Schooling Readers : Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction [1 ed.] 9780817389918, 9780817319168

Citation preview

SCHOOLING READERS

SCHOOLING READERS READING COMMON SCHOOLS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION

ALLISON SPEICHER

T H E U N I V E R SI T Y OF A L A BA M A PR E S S T USC A L O OSA

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 uapress.ua.edu Copyright © 2016 by Allison Speicher All rights reserved. Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press. Typeface: Minion Manufactured in the United States of America Cover art: Illustration from Benjamin Taylor’s poem “The District School,” Scribner’s Monthly, May 1874 Cover design: Mary-Francis Burt / Burt&Burt ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Speicher, Allison, author. Title: Schooling readers : reading common schools in nineteenth-century American fiction / Allison Speicher. Description: Tuscaloosa : University Alabama Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015039993| ISBN 9780817319168 (hardback) | ISBN 9780817389918 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. | Teachers in literature. | Students in literature. | Schools in literature. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. | EDUCATION / Philosophy & Social Aspects. Classification: LCC PS374.T43 S84 2016 | DDC 813/.3093557—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039993

for my mother, Karen Wisniewski Speicher, my first and best teacher

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

1. Pedagogues and Performers

20

2. Combatants and Collaborators 3. Teachers and Temptresses 4. Parents and Patrons Conclusion

58 91

135

172

Appendix: Archive of Common School Narratives Notes

185

Bibliography Index

233

213

179

Acknowledgments

Fittingly, given its subject, this book provides me with the opportunity to express my gratitude to the many individuals with whom I’ve shared a classroom, on both sides of the teacher’s desk. Schooling Readers never would have been written had not my graduate school mentor, Christoph Irmscher, decided to trust me when I pitched him a project built around a hundred-plus obscure texts. His keen insights and clear vision of this project’s potential contributed greatly to its final form. Generous with his time, his intellect, and his influence, Christoph has created many opportunities for me and modeled all I could wish to be as a teacher, a mentor, and a scholar. Donald Warren also played a significant role in shaping the project, continually reassuring me that a literary scholar could indeed have something important to share with historians of education. Jennifer Fleissner and Paul Gutjahr likewise offered valuable guidance. Suzanne Jones has provided sustained support over the last decade. My teaching mentors, Kimberlye Joyce and Kathy Smith, did much to shape the way I see the teacher’s work and, in turn, to shape this project. My new colleagues at Eastern Connecticut State University, especially Lisa Rowe Fraustino, have provided a warm welcome for my research and for me. I’m also deeply grateful to my students at ECSU, Indiana University, and Highland Springs High School for inspiring my thoughts about what it means to teach and learn. Thank you also to the staff of the University of Alabama Press for their efforts to bring this book to fruition. In addition to wonderful teachers, mentors, and colleagues, I am also surrounded by supportive friends and family. I’d especially like to thank Anna D’Ambrosio, who began the task of making me into a nineteenth-century

x • Acknowledgments Americanist when I was five years old, and my late grandfather, Joseph Wisniewski, who possessed limitless faith in my capabilities. Katherine Anderson, Shannon Zellars Strohl, and Lindsey Lanfersieck read drafts and offered much needed empathy, and the fierce and faith-filled women of my Bloomington book club also provided compassion and encouragement. My father taught me how to work hard, my sister is still my favorite student, and my mother remains my first and best teacher. She typed hundreds of pages of notes for this book, bringing order to scribbles on margins, musings on PostIts, and passages from sources, saving me labor and allowing me to share something I love. Mom, this book is for you.

Introduction

Hired as the editor of Hearth and Home in 1871, Methodist preacher Edward Eggleston was tasked with reviving the failing periodical. Hoping to attract subscribers with a quaint narrative of rural life, he drew on his childhood in Indiana to produce a story in Hoosier dialect based partly on his brother’s experience keeping school. He succeeded more than he had dared to hope. Reviewers hailed The Hoosier Schoolmaster as one of the first novels to represent midwestern life realistically, and the reading public loved it too: by the end of its serialization, the circulation of Hearth and Home had increased four- or five-fold.1 The novel was reprinted in periodicals across the country and promptly translated into French, German, and Danish.2 It even sparked an international vogue for spelling bees.3 With an unassuming narrative of the tribulations of a rural schoolteacher, Eggleston saved Hearth and Home and established his reputation as an innovative novelist with a taste for social history.4 Though The Hoosier Schoolmaster is a slender volume, it is remarkably action-packed. The novel traces the experiences of Ralph Hartsook, a young man who leaves his hometown, a small city in Indiana, to teach a common school in Flat Creek, a nearby rural community. In a single school term, Ralph has quite a series of adventures: he falls in love with a local girl at a spelling bee, becomes a father figure to one of his students, outsmarts the “big boys” when they try to expel him from the schoolroom, and narrowly escapes being lynched for crimes he did not commit. In the end, he wins over the community, but he leaves it behind, marrying his spelling bee love and returning to his hometown. The curious mixture of humor, sentimentality, and realism that makes The Hoosier Schoolmaster a compelling and confusing read is all

2 • Introduction Eggleston’s own, but the novel is as significant for the ways in which it carries on literary traditions as for the ways it innovates. The Hoosier Schoolmaster is one of many works of nineteenth-century fiction to feature a common school, the historical precursor to the public school, an institution intended to offer elementary instruction to all the children of a community from as young as age three to as old as age twenty-one. And the events of school life the novel privileges—the spelling bee and school exhibition, school romance, teacher-student adoption, and violence against teachers—have a long history before and after The Hoosier Schoolmaster. These four plot points appear again and again in American fiction from the 1820s into the 1890s. Collectively, they define the tradition of common school narratives, fictional representations of common schooling published during the expansion of popular education in the nineteenth century. Schooling Readers recovers this literary tradition, bringing together 125 narratives, which share a protagonist (a schoolteacher) and a setting (a rural community) in addition to a series of plot points. Although schooling developed differently in each region, narratives set in the South, the Midwest, the North, and the West prove strikingly alike, if not equally common. Though common school narratives appear in a variety of genres—sentimental novels, local color sketches, reform novels, regional novels, cheap magazine fiction— they unfold similarly in each of these contexts. But despite their versatility, numbers, and long-term popularity, common school narratives have been neglected by literary critics. Some common school narratives, such as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, have received considerable critical attention in other contexts, but the majority are long-forgotten magazine stories. This project thus draws attention to neglected texts and offers a new way of valuing them. In addition to their protagonists, settings, and plots, common school narratives also share an interest in responding to the common school reform movement, negotiating the meaning and promise of mass education as it was becoming a reality. By increasing the length of school terms and the number of years each student attended; improving the quality of teachers, textbooks, and school buildings; lowering the cost of schooling through tax support; and increasing school attendance, common school reformers promised grand social transformation. In a characteristic passage in his Twelfth Annual Report (1848), for example, leading school reformer Horace Mann proclaimed that in only two or three generations mass education would inaugurate heaven on earth by alleviating war, intemperance, and dishonesty, inspiring reverence

Introduction • 3 for “institutions of learning and religion,” and ensuring that only the best men gained political leadership.5 Though Mann’s utopian vision never became a reality, the nineteenth century was a period of great educational change, thanks in part to the efforts of reformers and of ordinary Americans. By 1860, thirty years into the reform movement, the once-controversial ideas that “schools should be supported by property taxes, should have greater uniformity, should be nonsectarian, should last for more than six months, and should be taught by trained, professional teachers” were widely accepted, though in the eyes of reformers much work remained to be done, particularly in rural areas.6 By examining the relationship of literature to common school reform, Schooling Readers fills a gap in literary history and enriches our understanding of the role of fiction in one of the most successful reform movements of the century. Despite the fact that modern representations of schools and nineteenthcentury British school stories have been studied extensively, common school narratives have not yet garnered scholarly interest.7 However, my focus on common schools extends to recent work on the interconnections between fiction and education in nineteenth-century America, including Mark Vasquez’s Authority and Reform (2003), Sarah Robbins’s Managing Literacy, Mothering America (2004), Angela Sorby’s Schoolroom Poets (2005), and Jaime Osterman Alves’s Fictions of Female Education (2009). Most closely allied to my project is Sarah Robbins’s work recovering the domestic literacy narrative. Much like the domestic literacy narrative, the common school narrative is a “flexible genre” that “circulated in a variety of publishing venues” throughout the nineteenth century. Robbins claims that authors of the domestic literacy narrative “valued literature not only as an aesthetic product but also as a source of knowledge and improvement.”8 This likewise holds true for common school fictions. The texts in Robbins’s archive and my own both portray characters gaining educations while offering an education to readers. Common school narratives, however, teach rather more equivocally than domestic literacy narratives do. According to Robbins, domestic literacy narratives model and engage in literacy management, carving out a critical role for women authors and women within the home as molders of literate and moral citizens. The lesson of common school narratives, however, cannot be condensed into such a precise and universally applicable statement. Instead, the lessons of these narratives reflect the diversity of the venues in which they appeared, the diversity of the authors who penned them, and the diversity of the readers to whom they were pitched. What they teach, and how they do

4 • Introduction so, varies. Schooling Readers aims to make sense of these lessons, to discern patterns in plot and message without flattening the rich diversity of common school fictions. Given that their subject matter is education, school stories lend themselves to instruction particularly well: as Beverly Lyon Clark explains in her study of Victorian school fiction, “Schooling is, in part, a metaphor for the effect that the book is supposed to have.”9 In order to consider how these texts teach lessons, throughout Schooling Readers I think about readers in two different but related ways. I consider the implied reader of these texts, the way the stories work to construct and instruct their imagined audiences. I am particularly interested in the ways the overt lessons these stories offer their readers, through prefaces and narratorial intrusions, frequently differ from the lessons suggested by the unfolding of the plot. Many common school narratives teach in equivocal ways: that is, they frequently tell readers one thing and show them another. Because I am interested in how literary form both creates the opportunity to teach readers and complicates authors’ ability to communicate their messages clearly, I pay special attention to this question in my extended readings of individual texts. Just as these stories reflect on the promise and pitfalls of common schooling, so too do they allow me to reflect upon the potentials and limitations of fiction as a mode of education. In addition to attending to how texts construct lessons for their implied readers, I try, as much as possible, to draw on actual reader response from the nineteenth century, in the form of book reviews, periodicals, and literary anthologies. While of course it is difficult to recover readers’ responses to twopaged stories published in local periodicals 150 years ago, for many of the common school narratives examined here, especially the novels, we do have reviews to draw upon. I use the phrase “schooling readers” to encapsulate the educative potential of common school narratives on both these levels, how these fictions seek to work on their implied readers and the effects they had on actual readers, which I unpack whenever I find them possible to reconstruct. We’re accustomed to thinking about what literature means and what schools do, but Schooling Readers flips this logic, considering instead what literature does and what schools mean. The context in which common school narratives appeared, a historical moment when popular schooling was being debated and expanded, gives them their educational force. By offering a particular vision of what schooling did, could, or should look like, common school narratives intervened into the conversation surrounding education reform. Many contemporary commentators had great faith in the educational potential of school fictions and their

Introduction • 5 substantial impact on real schools. For example, in March 1857 the American Journal of Education, the most important education periodical of its time, ran a new feature entitled “The Popular School and the Teacher in English Literature.” This inaugural article was the first of many the journal published over the next nine years reviewing a long history of literary representations of schooling. Literary texts, the author of the article explains, are worthy to appear alongside “elaborate dissertations by the best writers and thinkers of different countries and ages, on the principles and methods of education” for two reasons. First, they are valuable as historical documents: “the character of the school and the teacher at any given period, is to some extent reflected in the popular writings of the day.” But school literature does not just reflect contemporary educational practices, the author continues. To a “still greater extent,” existing educational practices are “perpetuated by such representation,” as fiction normalizes these practices for readers.10 Many of the author’s contemporaries shared his sense of the educative nature of school fiction, but while he focuses on the role of fiction in preserving the status quo, others celebrated the ability of literature to challenge and correct existing educational practices. Nineteenth-century schoolchildren had reason to be thankful for school fiction, or so many of their elders believed. In the eyes of one reviewer, school reform was “more speedily advanced” by the circulation of school fiction than by treatises written on education.11 Some went so far as to claim that school fiction saved lives: one enthusiastic reader of Locke Amsden (1847), for example, thanked the author for the “beautiful manner in which he has illustrated the subject of ventilating school houses,” thus saving “thousands of children” from being “sent to a premature grave by diseases contracted, aye, created, in school rooms.”12 Nor was such thinking restricted to the early days of school reform. Writing in 1892, in the introduction to an anthology of school stories, The Schoolmaster in Literature, Edward Eggleston praised Dickens’s Dombey and Son for doing more than the “soberest treatises on pedagogy to discourage the ancient mode of education by cramming, the only sort of infanticide permitted in civilized countries.”13 In the eyes of these readers, common school narratives performed what María Carla Sánchez calls the “social work of American literature,” working to “alter the institutions, systems, and processes that order our lives,” or, alternatively, to ensure they remain unaltered.14 Fiction’s reputed ability to change hearts and minds was particularly useful in the case of school reform, as reformers had little legal power and thus spread their message primarily through campaigns of persuasion.15 However, even ardent school fiction enthusiasts recognized that responding

6 • Introduction to educational practices was not the only aim of school stories. School fiction was seen as a particularly effective means of disseminating educational thought, in fact, because it would hold readers’ attention better than nonfiction and thus circulate more widely. That is, in addition to schooling readers, fiction was expected to amuse them. For example, Eggleston claims the selections included in The Schoolmaster in Literature, which range from the work of Rousseau and Pestalozzi to excerpts from Irving and Dickens, are sure to “delight” the “intelligent reader” as well as to edify him. Eggleston’s focus on the “intelligent reader” offers an ample hint as to what kind of “delight” he has in mind, and the final use he envisions for the school story confirms this hint: school fiction is also particularly useful as “a means of cultivating a taste for literature and a discriminating taste in literature.” The “delicate shading of artistic literature” adds to both the enjoyment and the instruction school fiction affords.16 The three uses of the school story Eggleston articulates here—instruction, entertainment, and artistry—echo those envisioned by reviewers throughout the period, who frequently comment not only on the ways in which school fiction promotes educational improvement but also on the quality of the writing and the amusement that school stories provide.17 Eggleston imagines these three aims as compatible and mutually reinforcing, and perhaps, within the confines of the carefully curated anthology, they are. Outside its meticulously controlled pages, however, in the dozens of school stories published throughout the century, instruction, entertainment, and artistry are as likely to come into conflict as to coalesce. The inconsistencies within these texts reflect not only the challenges of teaching via literature but also the fact that popular understandings of schooling continued to evolve throughout the century. Common school fiction is far more diverse in its forms and its messages than The Schoolmaster in Literature would lead readers to believe, ranging from one- or two-paged magazine stories to five hundred–paged novels, from sentimental novels to local color sketches. Common school narratives were published in both respected literary periodicals and dollar magazines, appeared both before and after the Civil War, and were written by northerners, southerners, midwesterners, and westerners alike. Rather than considering only a narrow range of texts and authors, those most obviously invested in common schooling, Schooling Readers demonstrates that writers devoted to reform as well as writers with different priorities shared concerns about education.18 Collectively, common school narratives offer unique insights into the ways common school reform was negotiated—insights that produce a different

Introduction • 7 picture of the common school than that which historians have derived from nonfictional sources. Fiction publication was accessible to a wide variety of writers, which likely contributes to this difference. So does the specificity of these texts, in contrast with the grand generalizations frequently offered by school reformers. Fiction writers replace the amorphous school, teacher, and students present in the writings of reformers with particularized classrooms populated by teachers and students with names and narratives. Picturing school life on a daily basis in a single community dissolves generalizations, and the image of school life fiction offers is decidedly messier than those offered in nonfictional sources. I suggest throughout Schooling Readers that one reason for this difference is the difficulty authors face meeting the expectations of fiction readers while also teaching a lesson. While some of these stories have intrusive narrators, even the most directive can’t offer the same kind of clean-cut pronouncements Horace Mann does and continue to look and read like fiction. This appreciation of the importance of fictional form is an essential way in which Schooling Readers differs from inquiries into school fiction conducted by historians of education. Nearly fifty years ago, Maxine Greene urged scholars to move beyond “the rhetoric of prophetic crusaders like Mann” in their studies of nineteenth-century education and promoted fiction as a valuable archive for doing so. In her groundbreaking book, The Public School and the Private Vision, she turned to the work of canonical writers like Emerson, Melville, and Thoreau, contrasting the “‘dark’ perceptions of life” of many literary authors with the hopeful exuberance of school reformers.19 By focusing on canonical writers, however, she missed the many nineteenth-century narratives that actually feature schools, and few historians have since taken up Greene’s charge.20 In Schooling Readers, I embrace Greene’s challenge, issued half a century ago, with the sensibilities and training of a literary scholar, seeking not to flatten out this literary tradition but rather to use the rich and diverse images of the common school it offers to add dimension to our understanding of nineteenth-century schooling.

Common School Reform: Change and Stasis Reading nineteenth-century school fiction for its lessons on education requires significant inquiry into the process and politics of common school reform, the movement to which common school narratives respond.21 Although the common school reform movement sought to reshape American education

8 • Introduction between 1830 and 1880, reformers did not invent local schooling, nor did they convince Americans to support it. By the 1830s, when common school reform first garnered significant attention, locally controlled, voluntary elementary schooling was already available in most communities.22 At some point in their lives, most white children attended one of a variety of institutions, including charity schools for the urban poor, inexpensive dame schools for small children, private academies and seminaries for older students, and rural district schools for children of all ages.23 Rural district schools were the most widespread form of schooling, particularly in the North and Midwest. These schools were organized by small communities and funded through a combination of property taxes, fuel contributions, tuition, and state aid. In the South, schoolmasters frequently selected their own locations and invited those parents able to pay tuition to send their children or taught in “oldfield schools,” cabins located on fallow land. The curriculum and clientele of these southern schools and rural district schools were quite similar, but fewer southern children attended school. Parents controlled these local institutions, selecting the textbooks, deciding what subjects should be taught, hiring teachers, and determining the length of the school term. Little power rested with the teacher, and turnover was high.24 In the winter, most schools were taught by men who doubled as farm laborers, tavern-keepers, prospectors, craftsmen, college students, and “[d]rifters shunning hard physical labor and handicapped fellows unable to perform it.”25 In the summer, when fewer mature pupils attended, many schools were kept by widows or young women who had just completed their own schooling. Although common school reformers appreciated the widespread public support for schooling, by the 1830s they began to criticize most of the defining characteristics of the district school: parental control, local funding, flexible school terms, itinerant and untrained teachers, and lack of uniformity. Reformers proposed replacing the variety of school options available with a single system of schools, supported by public funds, which would enroll all local children.26 When reformers spoke of the need to enroll all children, most meant all white children. African Americans were excluded from most common schools, as were American Indians.27 Historians debate the causes of the reform movement, but most acknowledge six important factors that made common school reform attractive after 1830: concerns about the fragility of the republic, urbanization, industrialization, immigration, changing views of childhood, and widespread Protestantism. From the time of the Revolution, leaders worried that the

Introduction • 9 fragile American republic could not survive without mass education, a concern that only intensified with the expansion of suffrage.28 Education was seen as “uniquely important for the cultivation of a national identity, for the maintenance of social cohesion and for the promotion of republican values.”29 This concern about social cohesion was accelerated by the social changes brought on by industrialization, immigration (particularly the mass immigration of Catholics), and urbanization, which made school systems a realistic possibility. Advocates hoped that schools would promote “order and harmony in an age when instability seemed to be an ever-present threat.”30 And if immigration, industrialization, and urbanization made shoring up traditional American values seem necessary, new views of childrearing and a Protestant belief in the perfectibility of human society made social change seem possible. The growing conviction that environment played a crucial role in character formation made schooling more important, as a skilled teacher could reshape malleable children into ideal moral citizens.31 Reformers believed that mass schooling would be a panacea for social ills: common schooling was expected to provide “moral education to produce obedient children, reduce crime, and discourage vice; citizenship training to protect republican government; literacy for effective economic and political participation; and cultural education for assimilation and unity.”32 Though the effects of common school reform were to be heavenly, the changes reformers proposed were rather more practical. As Joseph Kett rightly describes it, common school reform was a “curious mixture of tender sentiment and hard efficiency,” which is apparent in the changes reformers sought.33 One of their major targets was teachers: someone tasked with shaping children into moral citizens should not be an itinerant drifter, impecunious college student, or starving widow. Reformers campaigned for higher standards in hiring teachers, for state-funded higher education for future educators, and for increased attendance at summer teaching institutes.34 Poorly qualified teachers were only hired, reformers reasoned, because local school boards lacked the insight to choose well or refused to pay enough to attract qualified applicants. As a result, reformers took aim at the district system, hoping to consolidate independent districts into town school systems and to develop methods of state supervision and regulation. More effective oversight and consolidation of schools would allow for greater uniformity in schooling, removing important issues like curriculum and schoolhouse design from the vagaries of local opinion.35 To take advantage of these improvements, reformers claimed, children needed to attend school for longer periods of time each

10 • Introduction year and for more years. Many rural communities operated schools for eight to ten weeks in the summer and another eight to ten in the winter, which reformers saw as far too short. To increase attendance, reformers sought to eliminate rate bills, which required parents to pay some tuition for their children, and to support schools entirely through state funds and local taxes. Hoping to make schools more inviting, reformers took aim at corporal punishment, which made the schoolhouse a site of fear, and at stultifying pedagogy.36 Through these changes, reformers attempted to turn scattered local schools into a school system, staffed by competent and trained teachers, paid for by public funds, and open to all white children. Though this was a tall order, in many ways common school reform was highly successful. By 1860, state legislatures and local school committees in the North and Midwest had accepted much of the reform program. Free common schooling was widely available and most states had a superintendent to oversee schools. Corporal punishment had declined significantly, thanks in part of the hiring of female teachers, whose assumed moral superiority and willingness to accept low salaries made them a natural fit with the reform program. Almost all communities devoted more time and money to schooling than in 1830, and school terms were significantly lengthened.37 Still, work remained to be done. Improving teacher qualifications proved particularly difficult, and as late as 1910 more than a third of all teachers had not completed high school.38 Common schools were uncommon in the South until after the Civil War, when the North required each state pass a public school law as a condition for readmission to the Union.39 While urban school systems embodied the dreams of reformers, rural schools in all regions continued to be seen as problematic. In 1860, many communities still hired untrained, transient teachers to work in ramshackle buildings teaching a crowd of students of all ages, each of whom brought along a different textbook.40 In short, reformers remained dissatisfied with the results of their efforts in rural schools, the schools most Americans actually attended, so much so that by the 1870s discussion of “The Rural School Problem” was widespread.41 Schools in rural communities were difficult to consolidate for practical and philosophical reasons: they were located too far apart and rural communities clung to them tenaciously.42 Despite the successes of reformers, disagreements about the purposes and effects of schooling continued. Historians agree that virtually no Americans opposed schooling as such. Instead, Americans disagreed about who should oversee schools, how they should be funded, what role religion should play

Introduction • 11 in them, how to define teacher qualifications, what facilities were appropriate, what textbooks were needed, and how students should be instructed.43 Wholesale reform did not happen instantly; instead, schools “evolved by degrees.”44 Taxes, particularly property taxes levied on those without children, and centralized oversight proved especially controversial.45 In addition to these practical issues, the “millennialist rhetoric” that “suffused debates” over schooling meant that disagreements were “as likely to revolve around symbolic issues as real issues.”46 For example, community control was not only a practical concern, but also a sign of the high valuation rural Americans placed on autonomy.

Toward a New Understanding of Common Schooling Though historians concur that common school reform faced some opposition, despite widespread faith in schooling, most have had difficulty recovering specifics of this opposition. As Carl Kaestle explains, while reformers had their journals and reports, their opponents were far less organized, and “[m]any speeches against school reform were lost to history once their echoes died in town meetings or legislative halls.”47 Although the changes wrought by the reform movement were significant enough to require a reconsideration of the purposes and practicalities of schooling, evidence of how common school reform was negotiated within the day-to-day experience of schooling is difficult come by. In Schooling Readers, I offer a new archive for uncovering this negotiation, school fiction. Fiction allowed authors, wittingly or unwittingly, to expose the contradictions at the heart of the reform program: common schools were expected to be agents of compulsory liberation, to provide an anti-intellectual education, to strengthen the nation by strengthening the local community, to correct the teachings of mothers through the agency of mother-teachers. Rarely offering straightforward resistance or unthinking approbation, fictions engage with common schooling and the work of reformers in complex and nuanced ways. And instead of the continual concerns of reformers—school funding and supervision—they draw our attention to different aspects of school life. For example, fiction makes visible a preoccupation with the pleasures and dangers of student-teacher romance, though such relationships are virtually invisible in reform writing. In their own time, common school narratives presented a challenge to the thinking of reformers and to their ability to set the terms of the public conversation regarding schooling. In our time, they present a challenge to our

12 • Introduction historical narrative, promising to revitalize our understanding of the common school and school reform. Consider, for example, this representative passage from Kaestle’s Pillars of the Republic: Parents and teachers in the antebellum Northeast were not in a state of declared war, but neither was their relation blissful. The indifference of many parents to school exhibitions, the persistent belligerence of some others resisting school discipline, and the anti-parental propaganda of antebellum educators belie the notion of consensus and collaboration. The adjustment between the family and the antebellum school occasioned sporadic conflict between self-consciously “modern” school spokesmen and stubbornly traditional parents. In general, parents in nineteenth-century America wanted schools to take custody of their children, and they wanted schools to train their children in basic skills and attitudes. The eventual price that they paid was the loss of authority and control over their children’s education. The trade-off was made. The state successfully exerted its right to discipline all children in values that served the necessities of the school but also served social leaders’ notions of appropriate adult behavior and parents’ notions of appropriate childhood behavior. Parents’ acquiescence in the loss of control and involvement in schooling was often reluctant, but ultimately it was insured by the schools’ promise to confer opportunity and status.48 It is the vocabulary in this passage that interests me: conflict, price, authority, right, discipline, control. This language is pervasive in historians’ accounts of the common school, whether they trumpet the spread of school reform as a triumph of democracy and opportunity or disparage reformers as pawns of industry or the state. In these narratives, the common school becomes, first and foremost, a site of control—reformers, the upper classes, and the state try to control troublesome populations; students’ thoughts are controlled by stultifying pedagogy; students’ bodies are controlled through corporal punishment; students’ attitudes are controlled through moral suasion; rural citizens battle to control their schools. In part, this focus on control is a response to earlier scholarship, which privileged consensus and emphasized the ease with which common school reform was adopted, but this way of thinking dates back still further, to the reformers themselves. In Schooling Readers, I center other voices—the voices of ordinary Americans who took up their pens to

Introduction • 13 write about common schools, for prestigious literary journals and local periodicals alike—and, as a result, I tell a different story. Schooling Readers builds on the work of historians of education but shifts the focus dramatically. My archive demonstrates just how out of control the common school could be: boys violently attack their teachers, while girls try to seduce them. Relationships that start in the classroom refuse to be contained there. Attempts to assess student learning become over-the-top public spectacles. In the common school narrative, the school is a site of exploration and possibility in which conflict is only one part of a complex drama. Struggles for power appear side by side with narratives of falling in love, making friends, and learning one’s place in the community. (Thus, only one chapter of Schooling Readers, chapter 2, deals significantly with issues of conflict and control.) Rather than as a space in which children are remade into responsible and moral Americans, the common school emerges as a space with a permeable border, occupied not just by schoolchildren but also by a variety of adult stakeholders. Common school narratives show us that nineteenth-century Americans understood schools as much more than simply institutions of education: these stories have a great deal to say about topics as diverse as courtship norms, public entertainment, definitions of citizenship, and changing understandings of what it means to belong to a family. Revising our understanding of the common school thus promises to enrich our understanding of social life in nineteenth-century America more broadly.

Locating the Common School Narrative Reading comparatively proves very helpful for understanding the diverse ways school fictions respond to the expansion and reform of common schooling.49 My primary focus is on common school narratives produced between the 1830s and the 1880s. (A complete list is available in the appendix.) While the heyday of common school reform was from 1830 to 1860, I have elected to extend the period into the 1880s, in part because the 1870s proved a particularly rich decade for school narratives, but also because I wished to include southern schools. Though the common school reform program was largely accepted in the North and Midwest by 1860, much work remained, in reformers’ eyes, to make rural schools more closely resemble their age-graded and consolidated urban counterparts, and fiction published after 1860 reflects these enduring concerns. This date range allows me to consider fiction that is geographically diverse—the narratives include schools in the Northeast,

14 • Introduction the Midwest, the West, and the South, though not in equal proportions. The 1880s also prove a reasonable endpoint because historians mark the decade as the start of “Progressive Education.”50 I have included a few narratives from the fringes of this period, from the 1820s and the 1890s, because they prove useful in demonstrating the development of the common school narrative over time and highlight continuing interest in common school fiction to the turn of the twentieth century. While the narratives I have included thus span from Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) to Stephen Crane’s “Making an Orator” (1899), the highest concentration of texts appear between 1850 and 1880. This trend makes a great deal of sense. The proliferation of magazines, especially after the Civil War, led to a proliferation of fiction.51 Since common school narratives engage with school reform, not simply advocating changes but also negotiating their effects, it is unsurprising that the greatest number of school stories were produced in the decades when school reform had its greatest impact. In addition their dates of publication, the other tie that binds these narratives together is their focus on a rural common school and its teacher. I have included narratives about southern “old-field schools” and subscription schools, the kinds of schools most similar to common schools present in the South before the Civil War, because these narratives look surprisingly similar to those about schools in the Midwest and the North. I also briefly devote attention to freedmen’s schools in chapter 4 in order to offer a glimpse at the limited schooling available to African Americans, situating these stories within the context of the common school narrative. Because my focus is on fiction, I exclude another popular genre in which depictions of schooling frequently appear, memoirs like William Alcott’s Confessions of a School Master, since these sources are already well represented in histories of education. The decision to focus on rural schools was dictated by the fiction itself: I found very few stories depicting urban schools, and most of these appeared late in the period.52 To be sure, common schools are not the only kind of schools pictured in nineteenth-century fiction. But narratives about boarding schools and select academies raise different questions and anxieties than those expressed in common school narratives, as these schools served a different class of students and a different educational agenda. Narratives like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men and T. S. Arthur’s Cecilia Howard are thus beyond the scope of my inquiry. Most of the narratives in my archive were initially published in periodicals. It is little surprise that school fiction appeared regularly in magazines.

Introduction • 15 The number of periodicals published in the United States grew significantly over the course of the nineteenth century, slowly between 1800 and 1825, rapidly between 1825 and 1850, and exponentially between 1860 and the end of the century.53 From the start, “[r]eform of one kind or another” was a “preoccupation” of magazine editors, and education in particular was discussed widely in magazines.54 The variety of magazines in which common school narratives were published, however, is more surprising. Not only did common school stories appear in education periodicals like the American Educational Monthly, but also in magazines targeted to a variety of audiences: women’s magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book, literary periodicals like the Overland Monthly, religious publications like the Christian Union, children’s magazines like the Youth’s Companion, cheap general interest magazines like Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine, reform periodicals like the National Era, and agriculture periodicals like the Maine Farmer. This variety of publication venues does much to explain the varying perspectives common school narratives present and speaks volumes about the flexibility of the tradition. To offer a better sense of the diversity of readers who would have been exposed to school fiction, I provide a snapshot here of three periodicals that published a great number of common school narratives: a children’s magazine, the Youth’s Companion; a story paper, the Flag of Our Union; and a literary magazine, the Overland Monthly. While these are certainly not the only publications that published many school stories, the stark differences between their intended audiences serves as a useful illustration of the common school narrative’s reach and versatility. The Youth’s Companion was founded in 1827 as a magazine for children, designed to be instructive and entertaining and to “warn against the ways of transgression, error and ruin, and allure to those of virtue and piety.”55 After 1860, the emphasis shifted away from “Puritanism to Victorian sentimentalism,” and the magazine included more exciting and funny stories, sometimes without a clear moral.56 This is the period when common school narratives began to appear regularly in the magazine. After this change in emphasis, the Companion became one of the most popular magazines in the country, with a circulation that grew tremendously, from about 50,000 subscribers in 1867 to 400,000 twenty years later.57 In time, the magazine was “of such high quality that parents as well as their children were reading it.”58 In contrast to the Youth’s Companion, provider of wholesome entertainment, the Flag of Our Union, another key source of common school narratives, was a weekly story paper, a “not very respectable” literary magazine.59

16 • Introduction Best remembered today for the anonymous publication of Louisa May Alcott’s thrillers, the Flag of Our Union was an eight-paged weekly newspaper that contained only fiction. Self-described as a family magazine, the Flag of Our Union sought to include fiction suitable for adults and children alike. While critics today usually think of story papers as lowbrow, Lori Merish has shown that they were read widely and that the “line between story-paper fiction and more ‘reputable’ fictional fare was often difficult to draw.”60 The common school narratives that appeared in the Flag of Our Union reflect the desire to appeal to diverse tastes. While stories published in the Youth’s Companion often end in a little sermon, those from the Flag of Our Union are a curious mix of humor, romance, and reform, ranging from transparently reformist fiction like “The School in Perrin” to humorous stories like “In a Hoop Skirt.” And the common school narratives published in the Overland Monthly, yet another fruitful source, are different from those that appear in the Youth’s Companion and the Flag of Our Union. Despite the fact that the magazine was founded in 1868, late in the common school era, many school stories appeared in its pages. The Overland, published in San Francisco, began as a regional periodical but eventually acquired a nationwide readership, thanks in part to the literary contributions of its first editor, Bret Harte, himself a prolific author of common school narratives. One of the first magazines to be “consciously positioned as a bourgeois periodical,” the Overland was modeled on the Atlantic Monthly and published the work of many authors still familiar today, including Mark Twain, Frank Norris, and Jack London.61 Perhaps the magazine’s class aspirations explain why many of the common school narratives that appeared in the Overland are particularly unkind in their representations of rural communities: uneducated rural Americans are not members of the audience the publisher had in mind. As this brief discussion demonstrates, common school narratives are, of course, inflected by the aims of the periodicals in which they appear. Because this is so, I think it is useful that the common school narratives I draw upon throughout Schooling Readers come from a broad array of publications— forty-two, to be exact. While, as Michael Lund argues, it is difficult to count periodical readers and identify who was likely to read each magazine, the diversity of magazines from which I draw my fiction offers some sense of the variety of readers who would have been exposed to school fiction via periodicals, not to mention those who would have encountered it in book form.62

Introduction • 17

Plotting the Common School Narrative As discussed above, school fictions are multivocal and untidy, reflecting the messiness of the school experience they represent. Throughout Schooling Readers, I have striven to offer a productive response to that messiness, in my structure and approach, in my embrace of an unwieldy and diverse archive, in my refusal to offer a linear chronological narrative. The chapters that follow are organized thematically, around a series of plotlines that recur across the century, rather than chronologically. Each spans from the early days of school reform into the 1880s, allowing me to offer a narrative of continuity rather than a narrative of progress. Indeed, one of the most surprising aspects of common school fiction is a remarkable continuity in form and content before and after the Civil War, from the early days of the common school into nearly the twentieth century. Perhaps because the Civil War was a factor in ensuring the ultimate triumph of common schooling, opening the South to popular education, it did not lead to a decisive shift in school stories. Surely, too, the growing tradition of common school narratives contributed to the likenesses between them. Within each chapter, I have noted when I see patterns of change over time—for example, schoolmasters become more attractive around mid-century—but such changes are infrequent. Instead, school narratives published in the 1830s and 1880s share remarkable commonalities that defy our expectations, given that both fiction and education changed significantly over the course of that half-century. In each chapter, I trace the development of one of the four major plots that define the tradition of the common school narrative: school exhibitions and spelling bees, school violence, student-teacher romance, and teacher-student adoption. Each chapter places one of these plotlines into its historical context, then traces the formula through which the plot develops. I attempt to balance a broad view of the common school tradition with extended analyses of particularly rich common school narratives. In these extended sections, I think at length about how common school narratives work to shape the responses of their implied readers and the ways in which their fictional form complicates the messages they send. In chapter 1, “Pedagogues and Performers,” I argue that narratives about school exhibitions illuminate two intertwined concerns about common schooling: concerns about curriculum and concerns about class. Though some authors celebrate the exhibition as a means of community bonding,

18 • Introduction many more mock exhibitions and those who enjoy them. Presenting rural schoolchildren and their families as provincial and tasteless works to assuage anxieties that mass education could disturb social hierarchies. Whether they celebrate the exhibition or satirize it, narratives like Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale (1822), Warren Burton’s The District School as It Was (1833), and Caroline Kirkland’s “The Schoolmaster’s Progress” (1846) teach readers that schooling will preserve the status quo, for good or for ill. In narratives about spelling bees, considered at the end of the chapter, these class concerns are defused via a focus on the positive aspects of remaining within one’s rural community. From the ritual of the school exhibition, I shift my attention to another ritual of common school life, the barring out: students fortify the schoolhouse to keep the teacher from entering, defending their fortress with violence and demanding holidays, sweets (occasionally liquor), or both before the teacher is permitted to enter. In chapter 2, “Combatants and Collaborators,” I consider this scene’s long life in school fiction and its connections to other forms of violence, especially within Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871). School violence, I argue, served as means for the continual renegotiation of the relationship between teacher and community, between rural Americans and educated outsiders. In narratives of school violence, issues of school government (what we today call classroom management) shade into questions about government more broadly: what it means to submit to a teacher’s authority slides into considerations of what it means to belong to a community and a nation. In chapter 3, “Teachers and Temptresses,” my focus moves from the school as a site of violence to the school as a site of seduction. Common school narratives are filled with romances between schoolmasters and their students. With a particular focus on Daniel Pierce Thompson’s Locke Amsden (1847), Mary Jane Holmes’s Tempest and Sunshine (1854), and C.W. Bardeen’s Roderick Hume (1878), I argue that these narratives respond to the predominant anxieties about schooling for girls and women, that schools would turn out women of fashion and that education would adversely impact female sexuality. When schoolgirls and their teachers live happily ever after, fiction works to alleviate these concerns, highlighting how schooling prepares girls for marriage and motherhood, but when these romances end badly, they raise serious questions about the impact of schooling and about the costs of sexual desire. In chapter 4, “Parents and Patrons,” schoolmistresses become the center of attention as I consider literary responses to the mother-teacher ideal, the

Introduction • 19 belief that a good teacher should act like a mother to her students, which served as a justification for women’s entrance into the world of paid work. In a number of common school narratives, the concept of mother-teacher moves from a prescriptive metaphor to a literal reality, as schoolteachers become their students’ adoptive parents. Rather than celebrating the mother-teacher, as we might expect, these narratives dramatize two negative results of the promotion of this ideal. Texts like Bret Harte’s “M’liss” (1860, 1863, 1873) highlight the impediments it imposes on male teachers who wish to act as parents. Other stories, including Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “The Old Five” (1876) and Edward Everett Hale’s Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars (1878), focus on the difficulty female teachers faced in living up to an impossible ideal, especially in their relationships with students across lines of racial or ethnic difference. Finally, in my conclusion, I consider the common school narrative’s life after the end of common school reform. Revisiting each of these four plotlines, I highlight the lessons the tradition still holds for the twenty-first century reader.

1

Pedagogues and Performers

Before summer vacation begins in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Tom and his classmates endure a ritual that would have been familiar to nineteenth-century readers: Examination Day. To motivate his students to prepare, Mr. Dobbins relies on corporal punishment, earning him the hatred of students and critics alike.1 Despite his efforts to motivate his students, however, when Examination Day arrives, the schoolroom is ready, “brilliantly lighted, and adorned with wreaths and festoons of foliage and flowers,” but the scholars are not. They stumble through recitations of poems and speeches, even Tom, whose customarily extraordinary memory fails him when he attempts to recite Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech. Instead, our habitually theatrical hero is seized with an uncharacteristic case of stage-fright.2 After Tom retires in defeat, he disappears for several pages, as Twain recites a familiar litany of examination activities: declamations, geography exercises, a spelling bee, Latin recitations, and the reading of original compositions. It is ultimately to these compositions that Tom cedes the field, not to return until the next chapter, and Twain details them at length, lampooning their young female authors for their “nursed and petted melancholy,” “wasteful and opulent gush of ‘fine language,’” and inability to conclude without offering an “inveterate and intolerable sermon.” Though the girls believe their work to be original, their “themes were the same that had been illuminated upon similar occasions by their mothers before them, their grandmothers, and doubtless all their ancestors in the female line clear back to the Crusades.”3 Relishing the ridiculousness of these compositions, Twain offers their insipid and melodramatic texts at length, inviting the reader to laugh at them

Pedagogues and Performers • 21 even while pointing out how enthusiastically they are received by the citizens of St. Petersburg.4 When the compositions have all been delivered, the characters in the novel finally get a laugh too, at the schoolboys’ revenge on their master, and Examination Day ends. The way this chapter unfolds, detailing the preparation of the schoolroom and the students, the number of people in attendance, and the sequence of activities, shows that Tom isn’t the only one who likes to play by the book. Twain’s description of Examination Day replicates a familiar formula, present in common school narratives from as early as the 1820s. Twain manages to capture the look and feel of Examination Day in only a few short pages in part because the scene would have been so recognizable to his original readers, down to the very poems and speeches recited. Amusingly, then, it would seem that Twain critiques formulaic writing, in the form of the compositions, while wittingly or unwittingly following a formula himself. The scene captured the American imagination for quite some time— school exhibitions were present in fiction as early as the 1820s and as late as the 1890s, in texts by unknown writers and by canonical favorites like Twain. Across their long history in the school story, these scenes fit a familiar pattern, and collectively they illuminate two intertwined concerns about common schooling: concerns about curriculum and concerns about class. Such scenes raise questions about what students are learning in school and how this learning will prepare them for their later lives, either applauding students’ attainments or mocking the students, the community, and the teacher. While some authors privilege show and spectacle, many more deride the exhibition’s theatricality to highlight problems with curriculum and instruction. By doing so, these authors position themselves as better teachers than those in their stories, uniquely capable of distinguishing between the showy and the substantial for the benefit of readers. This concern about curriculum dovetails with the exhibition scene’s other major concern: issues of class. Here too Tom Sawyer is exemplary. Twain invites readers to laugh at the schoolgirls’ compositions, assuming that we, unlike the audience at the exhibition, can appreciate their unintended comedy. The people of St. Petersburg are blissfully unaware that the compositions are poorly written and they remain so: the narrator doesn’t school them. Readers thus maintain their superiority over the provincial characters within the narrative. Unlike Mr. Dobbins, Twain succeeds in imposing his pedagogical authority, reinforcing his readers’ presumed distaste for saccharine writing. This distance between knowing readers and ignorant characters is replicated

22 • Chapter 1 in many exhibition narratives, and it is one of the ways the stories think through the class implications of popular education. Presenting the patrons of the common school as provincial and tasteless works to assuage anxieties that increased access to schooling would upend social hierarchies. The anxiety these narratives address reflects a tension at the heart of the school reform program: as Horace Mann put it, without seeing the inherent contradiction, common schooling was to be both the “great equalizer of the conditions of men” and the “balance-wheel of the social machinery.”5 Historians debate whether class mobility, social stability, or some combination of the two was the goal of advocates of common schooling, whether schooling was to allow anyone with talent and dedication to succeed or to ensure that those in positions of privilege would maintain their privilege in the face of social change.6 Exhibition stories enter this debate, usually in conservative ways, highlighting the role of schooling in reinforcing students’ positions in rural communities. Many stories, like Tom Sawyer, mock the knowledge and values of rural communities, and the exhibition serves as proof that ignorant provincials will remain where they are. In others, however, the rural community and its values are privileged above those of outsiders, and stasis is presented positively, as rural Americans maintain their way of life in the face of challenges. Whether common school narratives celebrate or condemn exhibitions and the rural communities that enjoy them, collectively they demonstrate that schooling will preserve the status quo. A form of assessment intended to measure progress becomes instead a ritual of continuity.

A Formula for Assessment Though school exhibitions were emphatically local events, in schools across the United States—and in school fictions across the century—they assumed a familiar form. Typically, they blended oratory and theater with a series of questions posed to the students by the teacher or other examiners, often members of the school committee. Students frequently memorized and recited poems and orations, participated in spelling bees, solved math problems, and chanted geography.7 Exhibitions gave parents evidence of their children’s progress, and teachers were judged on the quality of their exhibitions. But assessment was scarcely the event’s only purpose: it also served as an advertisement for common schooling, increasing parental interest and bringing the community together to rally behind its school.8 School exhibitions solidified shared understandings of what skills and knowledge were valuable and

Pedagogues and Performers • 23 necessary and provided public venues for the display of cultural capital.9 In particular, the importance placed on public speaking, seen as preparatory for political participation, demonstrates the role of schooling in shaping collective values. In story after story, students recite the same pieces, which formed a repository of common knowledge. Readers are assumed to need only a few lines of “You’d scarce expect one of my age,” “Casabianca,” or William Pitt’s speech against the Stamp Act to recall the entire piece. The repeated return to the same texts is likely in part a result of common textbooks, but it also highlights the fact that school exhibitions were a tradition, both in fiction and in reality. The popularity of school exhibitions explains their endurance throughout the century: exhibitions were public social events and elaborate affairs, sometimes lasting two or three days and attracting spectators from near and far.10 In addition to the interest of the program itself, school exhibitions offered an opportunity for social interaction and celebration. In fact, exhibitions were so popular that schools were often too small to hold the large crowds they attracted, and churches, town halls, and taverns provided alternate venues.11 Exhibitions were routinely advertised in newspapers, which also frequently reprinted accounts of the day’s events, accounts that corroborate the image of the school exhibition fiction offers.12 Despite widespread public enjoyment of school exhibitions, however, the event was not without its detractors. Unsurprisingly, the fiercest critics of school exhibitions were common school reformers, at least in part because these community events interfered with their standardizing and centralizing impulses. By midcentury, exhibitions were cause of no little debate. As one contributor to the Connecticut Common School Journal put it, “There are scarcely any subjects, of interest to our schools, on which there prevails so great a diversity of opinion and action, as on examinations and exhibitions.”13 Most agreed that some form of summative assessment was necessary. A contributor to the District School Journal of the State of New York put it most eloquently: If every merchant and trader, at the return of short and stated periods, takes an inventory of his stock, and balances his sheet of profit and loss, to learn the actual condition of his affairs; if every frugal and prudent husbandman, at the close of each season, looks through his granaries, his barns, his cellars, to learn the degree of success which has rewarded his labors; surely at the happening of each epoch in the mental history of the children, their legal guardians

24 • Chapter 1 and supervisors should set themselves carefully and earnestly to the work of ascertaining their condition and estimating their advancement. The close of every school is such an epoch. A season has passed; has any harvest been gathered?14 Although the author of this article employs farming metaphors, his understanding of the purposes of schooling is very different from that of the rural crowds who flocked to school exhibitions. Instead of proud parents and teachers, the schoolchildren have “legal guardians and supervisors.” Instead of an institution for building community, the school is an economic investment, and the author advises people to be sure that they are getting proper returns. Student learning is to be estimated and recorded on a balance sheet. The students are statistics, not individuals, waiting to be measured, not applauded. And if the students are statistics, then the theatricality of the school exhibition must give way to the accountability of the school examination. Reformers urged the public to distinguish between exhibitions, a form of entertainment, and examinations, legitimate summative assessments. Some open-minded reformers were willing to concede that school exhibitions could have value—“It is delightful at times to hear beautiful reading, fine memoriter recitations, and thrilling declamations”—but urged communities to have both exhibitions and examinations.15 Unlike an exhibition, an examination should “ascertain the nature and extent of mental discipline that pupils have acquired” and “test, in every suitable manner, their understanding of the various principles, facts and thought that should have been developed by the branches to which attention has been given.”16 Reformers sought to replace recitation of textbooks with tests of students’ understanding of the material they learned. By their logic, teachers would be encouraged to teach their students a more meaningful and difficult curriculum if it was knowledge, not showmanship, that was assessed at the end of the school term. Reformers worried that exhibitions interfered not only with the intellectual mission of schooling, but also with its moral aims, teaching children to lie, to pursue goals for vanity’s sake rather than for their intrinsic good, and to strive to surpass others in an unchristian manner.17 This last issue provoked heated debate between the 1820s and the 1850s.18 For example, in his highly influential Theory and Practice of Teaching (1847), David P. Page argues that encouraging competition, or emulation, as it was then called, teaches children to “undervalue the higher reward of a good conscience, and a love of learning for its own sake.”19 While emulation had its supporters, school reformers

Pedagogues and Performers • 25 believed it was seriously injurious to children’s characters.20 Underlying this concern about students’ virtue is a desire to check students’ competitive impulses, a sign of the uneasiness of reformers with students using the common school as a means to rise above their current circumstances. In lieu of public shows, reformers recommended two alternatives: visits to schools by examiners on ordinary school days, when the school was “performing its daily work in its every day dress,” and written examinations, the “most satisfactory method of all.” Advocates of written testing acknowledged that such an examination “presents no attraction whatever to beholders,” as “[s]tillness reigns, broken only by the scratching of pens upon the paper, or by the clicking of pencils upon the slates, and until the papers are completed nothing can be more dull for the visitor than watching the pupils as they proceed with their work, and counting the minutes and the hours as they slowly roll away.” Perhaps this is why written examinations almost never appear in fiction: written tests lack the theatrical, social, and narrative appeal of oral examinations. Standardized testing is, quite simply, not the stuff of which good fiction is made. However, in the eyes of reformers, the loss of amusement was to be compensated for by the ability to “ascertain the true position of every scholar in every branch of study,” thus ensuring that students are mastering a rigorous curriculum.21 Furthermore, preparation for written tests, reformers argued, did not eat up valuable class time to the neglect of continuous study, nor did written tests mistake showiness for true knowledge.

Fictionalizing the School Exhibition Reformers succeeded in promoting written tests in cities.22 But in rural communities, the exhibition continued to be valued as a public show despite their protests, as school fictions make clear. While reformers squabbled about ways of encouraging and measuring student learning, confident that more accurate modes of assessment would encourage higher student achievement, their literary counterparts examined the school exhibition from a different angle. The question school fiction raises is not how learning can be measured, but rather which learning might be valuable to and attainable by rural Americans. Rather than weighing students’ understandings in school fiction, exhibitions become a chance to weigh the merits and the limitations of popular schooling in rural communities. These stories ask: How does the school curriculum suit local needs, preferences, and values? Should schooling prepare children for life within their communities or for futures outside of them? Like reformers, literary authors distinguish between show and substance,

26 • Chapter 1 but not for the purpose of enforcing a particular and narrow vision of the proper learning to take place in the school. Instead, those authors who present the school exhibition critically or satirically do so to paint an unflattering picture of life in rural communities. Rather than claiming that exhibitions fail to assess student learning adequately, these stories show that the exhibition reflects the community’s knowledge and values far too well—the citizens are as laughable as the shows they put on. These stories assuage anxieties about the changes mass education promised: the school curriculum and students’ mastery of it are mediocre, but this is a source of comfort, not concern, as it means that schools will do little to threaten the status quo by helping students achieve class mobility. Those authors who celebrate the exhibition, conversely, approach the issue from the opposite perspective, displaying pride in rural communities. Rather than helping students gain new knowledge that might allow them to change their social positions, the school serves as a means of inculcating knowledge and values already shared by the adults of their community. Schools in these stories do not need more rigorous curricula and more accurate assessments, because book learning is only a small part of the school’s agenda. Literary depictions of the school exhibition, then, assess not student progress, but rather rural communities and their way of life. Collectively, these stories reopen a question reformers assumed they had already answered: what uses can the school, and the knowledge it disseminates, serve in a rural community? By doing so, they challenge reformers’ ability to set the terms of the conversation surrounding the school exhibition. School fictions also challenge our historical understanding of the event and its meaning, revealing how significantly our understanding has been shaped by that of reformers. In Testing Wars in the Public Schools, for example, historian William Reese proclaims that the “nineteenth century was the age of examinations,” that “our national obsession with testing” began in the antebellum period. By the 1870s and 1880s, he explains, high-stakes written testing was so widespread it generated a backlash, and by 1900 the influence of written tests “seemed unassailable.”23 Reese seeks to demonstrate the ways in which Horace Mann and his ilk set us on the path to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the contemporary standards movement, but in doing so he reduces the exhibition to just another form of test—and fiction reveals that exhibitions were much, much more. By seeing the exhibition solely as an assessment, we lose our sense of the importance of the event as a means of dramatizing and solidifying a community’s way of life. The exhibition is a display of students’ mastery of the curriculum,

Pedagogues and Performers • 27 but of the social curriculum of the school, not merely the academic one. The longevity of the school exhibition in fiction suggests that questions about the purpose and promise of schooling remained open throughout the century. To chart how authors use the school exhibition to consider these questions, I begin my analysis by focusing on three common school narratives published before exhibitions faced their greatest challenges from reformers, outlining the blueprint they create that continued to evolve throughout the century: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale (1822), Warren Burton’s The District School as It Was (1833), and Caroline Kirkland’s “The Schoolmaster’s Progress” (1846). A New-England Tale is an orphaned girl’s coming-of-age story, The District School is a reform tract in the guise of a fictionalized memoir, and “The Schoolmaster’s Progress” is a satirical short story, but despite these differences, they present exhibitions quite similarly. Each story considers questions of curriculum and class, weighing the knowledge and values of a rural community, as embodied by its school, against those of educated outsiders.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale (1822) Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale provides a strong example of the ways in which class and curriculum become intertwined in common school narratives. The heroine, Jane Elton, an orphan from a good family that falls on hard times, achieves academic and personal success, and Sedgwick encourages readers to follow in Jane’s footsteps. The crowning moment of Jane’s academic career? A school exhibition, of course. The events of the exhibition scene seem to highlight the role of the school in rewarding the meritorious, but the details of Jane’s story more broadly suggest an ambiguous message about the role of schooling in enhancing social mobility. Like many authors of common school narratives, Sedgwick schools readers in ambivalent ways, as her didacticism often runs counter to the conclusions her plot and characterization suggest. It is little surprise that Sedgwick’s novel is invested in schooling readers: Sedgwick started writing the text as a religious tract, then later expanded it into a novel.24 Because of its origin, the “didactic messages” of A New-England Tale are explicit,25 as reviewers recognized and applauded, recommending the work to “the attention of friends of piety and virtue as giving just views of scripture truth and moral duty.”26 Among one’s moral duties, the novel suggests, is taking advantage of one’s opportunities, precisely as Jane

28 • Chapter 1 does. The novel’s emphasis on the school as a site of moral, academic, and social learning reflects Sedgwick’s experience with classroom teaching,27 and its overt attempts to school readers exemplify her “efforts to enact authorship as a teaching enterprise across class lines for the national welfare.”28 Sarah Robbins has detailed Sedgwick’s efforts to justify her class privilege “by defining ‘ladies’ from [her] social group as having beneficent teaching responsibilities” outside of the home, and A New-England Tale reflects these aims.29 From the moment schooling is introduced in the text, its value in rural communities is highlighted. The narrator explains that “[t]here is nothing in New-England so eagerly sought for, or so highly prized by all classes of people, as the advantages of education,” lauding the sacrifices that poor farmers and laborers in particular are willing to make to allow their children to attend school.30 However, when a school opens the “village of ____,” the unnamed New England town where the novel is set, Jane cannot afford to attend, since her adoptive aunt will not pay the nominal fees.31 Mr. Lloyd, a kindly neighbor, comes to Jane’s rescue, paying her tuition, a sign of his goodness and the novel’s high valuation of schooling. Jane pays him back amply, both in her performance at the school exhibition and, later in the text, by marrying him. Jane enters the school as an underdog, a student whose meager tuition must be paid through charity, but her merits quickly shine through. The school becomes a site where meaningless distinctions are stripped away and meaningful acquirements are celebrated, as the contrast between Jane and her cousin Martha makes clear. Martha is four years older than Jane, and she and her mother feel that preeminence is her birthright because of her class position. Martha considers her cousin’s “equality” an “insult to herself,” and, rather than accepting Jane’s intellectual superiority, she concludes that Mr. Lloyd must have bribed the teacher to give her special treatment. Despite enduring such slander, Jane goes “rejoicing on her way, far before her cousins,” a circumstance that adds interest to the school exhibition, planned for the end of the term.32 Sedgwick’s description of the school exhibition follows a formula frequently repeated in later school fiction. She starts with a description of the preparations: “We doubt if the expectation of the tournament at Ashby de la Zouche excited a greater sensation among the knights-templars, Norman lords, and wandering chevaliers, than the anticipation the exhibition produced upon the young people of ____.” As the school is too small to accommodate all those planning to attend, the villagers transform the church, laying a floor over the pews, hanging curtains, and installing a chair, “a present

Pedagogues and Performers • 29 from Queen Anne to the first missionary to the Housatonick Indians,” on stage as a throne for the chief performer.33 As these quotes demonstrate, the villagers, young and old, view the exhibition as an historic event and prepare for it accordingly. The tone here is gently mocking—Sedgwick, if not the villagers, knows that a school exhibition isn’t actually an historic event—but while she exposes their provincialism, Sedgwick also appreciates the seriousness with which they approach education and presents the exhibition as a cause of celebration, particularly for her exemplary heroine. The program is so jam-packed it spans two days. Much like school reformers, Sedgwick distinguishes between the exhibition and the examination, allotting the first day to thorough questioning and the second to oratory and the reading of compositions. Unlike reformers, however, Sedgwick presents emulation as just: the awarding of prizes is central to the scene and to the unfolding of the novel’s plot. These awards help Sedgwick to convince the reader of both the depth and the value of the students’ studies, and her heroine provides a prime example of what schooling can accomplish. During the examination, Jane is “crowned with honors,” which she “bore so meekly, that she had the sympathy of the whole school—except that (for the truth must be told,) of her envious cousins.”34 Jane’s merits earn her not only academic recognition, but also social recognition, as her classmates learn to value her both for her learning and for her grace in demonstrating it. At the sight of Jane’s success, Martha bursts into “tears of spite and mortification,” while Elvira, her sister, brags that she is sure she and not Jane will win the composition prize the following day. The next day, it appears that Elvira has triumphed: when the curtain is lifted to reveal the author of the prize composition, Elvira is “seated in the throne, ambitiously arrayed in a bright scarlet Canton crape frock, a white sarsenet scarf, fantastically thrown over her shoulders,” while her hair flows “in ringlets over her neck, excepting a single braid, with which, as she fancied, ‘a la grecque,’ she had encompassed her brow.”35 Elvira’s inappropriate costume reflects her desire to flaunt her riches and beauty, rather than viewing these as privileges that come with responsibilities, as Sedgwick did. Given the text’s emphasis on Jane’s retiring disposition, labeling Elvira as “ambitiously arrayed” is meant to be insulting. Even more inappropriate than Elvira’s dress is her behavior. Unlike her cousin, whose meek acceptance of awards wins her respect, Elvira takes such pleasure in self-display that the audience is uncomfortable watching her. Even worse, she has no right to take pleasure in her work: an audience member uncovers her plagiarism. Rather than leaving the

30 • Chapter 1 exhibition in triumph, the Wilsons depart in deserved dishonor. Elvira may have money, but it is Jane who has class. The teacher insists that the author of the best original composition read her piece, and of course this author is Jane. In contrast to her arrogant and fashion-obsessed cousin, Jane wears “a plain black silk frock, and a neatly plaited muslin vandyke; her rich light brown hair was parted on her forehead, and put behind in a handsome comb.” The exhibition reveals not only the students’ academic attainments, but also their character, as the contrast between Jane and Elvira’s appearances makes clear. Jane is dressed to honor the occasion without indulging personal vanity. Indeed, her lack of confidence is almost paralyzing; she only finds the courage to share her work when she sees the “approving, encouraging smile of her kind patron,” Mr. Lloyd. Jane’s essay is about gratitude, and “Mr. Lloyd felt the delicate praise.”36 His feelings for Jane, not revealed until later in the novel, intensify, and she also attracts the attention of the wealthy Edward Erskine, who previously showed romantic interest in her cousin. Eventually, Jane marries Mr. Lloyd, whom she wins over with feminine modesty and academic achievement, an unfailingly attractive combination in school fiction, as we shall see in chapter 3. Sedgwick repeatedly holds Jane up as an exemplar for readers, and her academic and romantic success seem to reflect the school’s role in discerning, developing, and rewarding talent whether it appears among the wealthy or the poor. Jane’s mastery of the curriculum, as revealed at the school exhibition, wins her social status and class mobility—or so it seems. However, Jane’s apparent class mobility actually restores her to her earlier class position. Although Jane is impoverished, due in part to her father’s business mistakes and overspending, she is no common pauper, but rather a young lady from the upper classes who has slipped through no fault of her own. Jane’s triumph over the Wilsons, who come to moral and financial ruin, seems like the rightful result of her hard work, but her marriage to Mr. Lloyd also returns Jane to the class to which she already belonged by virtue of her birth. Jane’s marriage returns her to her childhood position quite literally: Mr. Lloyd owns her childhood home. The novel thus reflects a tension at the heart of school reform program, the desire both to offer opportunities to the deserving and to preserve the status quo. Furthermore, Jane is truly exemplary, the top scholar in every subject, capable of facing a lifetime of mistreatment without becoming bitter. Her rise in status is clearly the exception, not the rule; she is so idealized there is no need to be concerned that many can replicate her path, though Sedgwick encourages readers to follow in her footsteps. While the

Pedagogues and Performers • 31 story presents Jane as an exemplar worthy of the reader’s emulation, few can truly aspire to her rare blend of grace, intellect, and beauty.37

Warren Burton’s The District School as It Was (1833) Just as the school exhibition in A New-England Tale exemplifies the ways in which discussions of curriculum and achievement slide into discussions of class, so does the school exhibition in Warren Burton’s The District School as It Was, a series of sketches detailing several years of a boy’s schooling. But while Sedgwick celebrates the exhibition as a moment of genuine accomplishment and community pride, Burton exploits the exhibition for its comic value, poking fun at the students and community, who take it far too seriously. Rather than presenting readers with a heroine and a school worthy of emulation, Burton invites readers to look down on the community he depicts, schooling readers through satire. The absurdities of the school curriculum are outstripped only by the foolishness of the community’s pride in its children’s questionable accomplishments—as any reader with class can tell. Burton’s commitment to educating his audience is made explicit in his preface. He declares that the narrative, which offers “the experience of a supposed school-boy,” is “true to nature, no matter whether it really be, or be not that of the Author.”38 Like other authors of reform literature, Burton views fiction as an appropriate vehicle of truth, regardless of factual accuracy, and he trusts the reader to share this perspective and thus to be open to the lessons the text teaches. Although the narrative does not relay the events of Burton’s own schooldays, he was no stranger to the classroom—he taught school himself—or to reform. The preface announces his reformist intent: “This little volume was written in the hope that it would be a trifling aid to that improvement which is going on in respect to common schools” and to “present a pleasant picture of some peculiarities which have prevailed in our country, but are now passing away.”39 Burton’s contemporaries applauded his success in achieving both his aims. The text was praised highly in educational and literary journals alike, a sign of the acceptability of subtle didacticism to contemporary arbiters of literary taste. The reviewer for the Family Lyceum, for example, found it “difficult to say for which this book can be most highly recommended, for the instruction or the amusement it must afford to any one and every one” who reads it.40 In addition to appreciating Burton’s storytelling, reviewers heralded the book’s contributions to reform, its accurate depiction of schooling, and its

32 • Chapter 1 lesson for teachers, parents, and school boards, a “moral not proclaimed with the sound of a trumpet by the author, as the burden of his story; but silently inculcated, or incidentally alluded to, and inferentially enforced by powerful illustrations, and sure to be more graciously received than if ostentatiously brought forward.”41 The exhibition scene plays a central role in “silently inculcat[ing]” the book’s lesson. It centers on two characters whose names reveal much about Burton’s brand of satire: Memorus Wordwell, the “most extraordinary spelling, and indeed reading machine, in our school,” and Mr. Spoutsound, a schoolmaster so small that he “ought to have been pedagogue in that land of littleness, Lilliput,” who attempts to compensate for his diminutive size with his blaring voice.42 Memorus is a local legend, a boy who conquered the spelling book in half the time it took the average child. But he is no hero in the story. Instead, Burton uses him to illustrate reformers’ claim that children were frequently forced to memorize that which they did not understand. The narrator explains that “although he was thought so surprisingly bright, he was the most decided ninny in the school.” He blames Memorus’s parents and teachers, who never considered that “words and sentences were written, and should be read, only to be understood.”43 Burton takes aim at antiquated pedagogy, which the exhibition’s focus on performance seems to license. Mr. Spoutsound’s embrace of the exhibition deepens Burton’s critique. Mr. Spoutsound views the exhibition as an opportunity to showcase his own “vocal extraordinariness” and to remake his students in his own image: “like our district professor, we had the impression that noise was the most important quality in eloquence.”44 Trusting in their schoolmaster’s expertise, the students and community prepare for the exhibition with gusto, and Burton uses these scenes of preparation to demonstrate that, much as reformers feared, weeks that could be used for learning are instead sacrificed to rehearsal. Oratory has “swallowed up very much of the time that should have been devoted to the really important branches of education,” and as a result the students lack useful knowledge.45 While the exhibition in A New-England Tale highlights students’ sizeable accomplishments in a number of subjects, for Burton a desire to put on a good show is incompatible with meaningful learning. No one in the community seems to mind, however. Instead, on the night of the exhibition, the schoolhouse is crowded beyond its capacity with visitors from near and far. While the reader is expected to absorb and agree with Burton’s reformist perspective, the locals within the story remain oblivious to the faults of their school and its teacher. Indeed, when the farcical Mr.

Pedagogues and Performers • 33 Spoutsound performs his opening piece, they are filled with “admiration, yea, astonishment, that the schoolmaster ‘could speak so,’” never questioning the compatibility of his desire to flaunt his own accomplishments with the instruction of their children. Mr. Spoutsound’s recitation is followed by the children’s performances of exhibition favorites, delivered in ridiculous costumes discovered in their elders’ closets. “To see the old fashions on the young folks, and to see the young folks personating characters so entirely opposite of their own” was “ludicrously strange,” but “most of the company present were so fortunate as to perceive no bad taste to mar their enjoyment.”46 This commentary drips with sarcasm, and it accords with reformers’ critiques of the exhibition’s valuation of show over substance.47 But the audience enjoys the event, which doesn’t seem particularly unfortunate. And the story is told in a way that makes the exhibition enjoyable for the reader too. Nostalgia creeps into the scene, as Burton lavishes attention on the students’ excitement, so intense they can barely sleep at night. The thrill of the school exhibition is palpable in the text, and Mr. Spoutsound’s declamation leaves the audience breathless. While the reverence with which the community treats the exhibition makes the satire all the more pointed, it also makes an encounter with Mr. Spoutsound seem fun after all, which may be why Burton hurries to the end of the chapter. In order to present the exhibition in a negative light, Burton barely presents it at all, racing from the preparations to the end of the show in five short pages. Immediately after relating Memorus’s speech, the narrator abruptly remarks that “this chapter must be ended, so we will skip to the end of this famous exhibition.”48 Burton spends considerably more space on considerably less amusing aspects of the school experience, and it seems that the amusement the exhibition affords is precisely why the scene must be cut short. The reader is meant to be critical of Mr. Spoutsound, Memorus, and the townspeople seduced by their powers, but the event actually seems quite enjoyable, if not particularly educational. In addition to the critique of curriculum present here—the overvaluation of oratory over more useful subjects—issues of class are also at work. Mr. Spoutsound’s single quarter at an academy is his main qualification for teaching oratory, scarcely an impressive one, and the townspeople have still less education, which allows them to enjoy speaking that would sound awful to people of culture, like the narrator, and, implicitly, the reader. Burton’s satire raises the question of audience: would readers who resemble the locals in the story appreciate the humor? By assuming that readers will grasp and appreciate his sarcasm, Burton implicitly defines his audience as excluding precisely

34 • Chapter 1 those readers most in need of the book’s lesson. Those who need the corrective the text offers are likely to be offended, not educated, by it. The reader is invited to laugh at the ignorant and classless townspeople, not to identify with them. Burton emerges as an arbiter of culture, capable, unlike the locals, of distinguishing between show and substance. Because of this, The District School teaches another lesson, different from that which the preface announces: readers needn’t worry that learning gained in a common school will allow students to join the elite to which Burton and the reader presumably belong. What looks like a reformist critique of a shallow curriculum emerges instead as a class commentary, as a way of solidifying the superiority of people of culture over ignorant rural folk.

Caroline Kirkland’s “The Schoolmaster’s Progress” (1846) In contrast to A New-England Tale, written before serious attempts at school reform began, and The District School, written during the early days of reform, Caroline Kirkland’s “The Schoolmaster’s Progress” is a product of the 1840s, the same decade in which school exhibitions began to come under fire. When “The Schoolmaster’s Progress” was published, Kirkland had already gained fame with A New Home—Who’ll Follow?, and, although Western Clearings, in which the story appeared, was not regarded as highly, reviewers appreciated this story in particular for its “unrivalled [. . .] truth and humor” and lifelike depiction of the schoolmaster.49 Like Sedgwick and Burton, Kirkland was a teacher herself.50 But while Burton makes fun of a rural community’s claims to achievement and Sedgwick celebrates them, Kirkland offers a third option, gently mocking both a rural community and the alleged “elites” who feel free to judge them. In Kirkland’s view, the exhibition isn’t just a show of knowledge but rather a way of unifying a community and affirming its shared values. She turns the question of whether schooling could help rural Americans achieve class mobility inside out: belonging to the community, rather than rising above it, is the ultimate prize in “The Schoolmaster’s Progress.” The schoolmaster, Master Horner, forms the center of the story, and, like Mr. Spoutsound, his physical peculiarities speak for his character and for his author’s brand of humor. Knowing that “facial solemnity stood high on the list of indispensable qualifications” for teachers, he never smiles or laughs. Like his most famous predecessor, Ichabod Crane, Master Horner is tall, lanky, and awkward. His “figure and movements were those of a puppet cut out of shingle and jerked by a string,” but nonetheless he wins over the

Pedagogues and Performers • 35 people of the village, teaching the school for a record three terms.51 When we are first introduced to Master Horner, he is still seeking to earn his place as schoolmaster and, as such, undergoes a teacher examination, a scene that appears with some frequency in common school narratives. Like the exhibition, scenes of teacher examinations tell us much about how the learning of rural Americans was perceived, and, like the exhibition, these scenes are usually comical. The examination in “The Schoolmaster’s Progress” provides a case in point. The narrator muses, “We know not precisely what were Master Horner’s trials; but we have heard of a sharp dispute between the inspectors whether a n g e l spelt angle or angel. Angle had it, and the school maintained that pronunciation ever after.” As in The District School, a knowing reader is licensed to laugh at the foolishness of rural Americans and the inadequacy of their curriculum. The narrator explains, “Our law prescribes examinations, but forgets to provide for the competency of the examiners; so that few better farces offer, than the course of question and answer on these occasions.”52 The humor of the scene helps to explain its repeated appearance in school narratives, and most authors use it as Kirkland does, to highlight the inadequacy of local school examiners in hiring teachers, a critique reformers often voiced, calling for supervision at the state level. In Ruth Hall (1855), Fanny Fern similarly pokes fun at examiners, who require applicants to write an essay on whether Columbus discovered America while standing up or sitting down. The examiner in “Pete” (1871) requires the candidate only to spell three-letter words before awarding the desired certificate, the examiner in Horatio Alger’s “Cousin John” (1856) asks a schoolmistress to spell words he himself doesn’t know, and the examiners in “A Letter from Zekiel Stebbins” (1864) can neither spell nor add.53 What is interesting and unique about Kirkland’s use of the scene, however, is that she criticizes the examiners without painting the entire community with the same brush: her critique is of the law that requires examinations without providing qualified examiners, rather than of the community as a whole. The brief scene sets the stage for her approach to the school exhibition and spelling bee, scenes in which a gentle parody of the pretensions of this rural community is tempered by a wholehearted appreciation of the school as a site of community bonding. The spelling school is a prime event for such bonding. Frequently, spelling bees were part of school exhibitions, as they are in Tom Sawyer and The District School, but they were also held as separate events, involving not just the students but the entire community. In “The Schoolmaster’s Progress,” the spelling school serves as a prelude to the exhibition. The event draws “all the

36 • Chapter 1 young people for miles around, arrayed in their best clothes and their holiday behaviour” and provides a prime opportunity for courtship. A young woman, Ellen Kingsbury, triumphs in the contest. As Master Horner gives out more and more difficult words, Ellen “blushed, and smiled, and blushed again, but spelt on, until Mr. Horner’s cheeks were crimson with excitement.” When the spelling ends, the master “said so many gallant things to his fair enemy” that he makes Harriet Bangle, a visiting easterner who condescends to attend the bee, quite jealous. Miss Bangle brings to the frontier a “variety of city airs and graces somewhat caricatured, set off with year-old French fashions much travestied.”54 While she fancies herself to be socially superior to the residents of rural Michigan, Kirkland uses her character for a laugh. When her coquetry proves insufficient to attract the master’s attention, Miss Bangle seeks revenge on Ellen, writing a series of love letters to the master in Ellen’s name, hoping to embarrass them both. Of course, the truth must come out—and what better occasion than the school exhibition? Kirkland’s selection of this event for the revelation of the truth shows that both she and the villagers see its main purpose not as assessing students’ knowledge, as reformers wished, but rather providing an opportunity for building community. Master Horner puts his heart into preparing for the exhibition, not to create a false show of the students’ accomplishments, as reformers suspected, but rather because the exhibition will be the last stage of his courtship with Ellen, the ultimate event he plans to use to convince her to marry him. As in A New-England Tale and The District School, preparations for the event are detailed: “Not a candlestick nor curtain that was attainable, either by coaxing or bribery, was left in the village; even the only piano, that frail treasure, was wiled away and placed in one corner of the rickety stage.”55 Like the townsfolk in The District School, Kirkland’s villagers have little to offer by way of theatrical sets, but Kirkland treats them with considerably more kindness than Burton did. Despite these preparations, the exhibition is a disaster. During rehearsal, Master Horner mentions their correspondence in a conversation with Ellen, confusing and mortifying her so greatly that she contracts a high fever, a perfectly reasonable response to an unsolicited declaration of love. With his real purpose destroyed, Master Horner can barely go through the motions, mechanically performing duties once considered thrilling. The exhibition goes dreadfully, despite the fact that the students must know as much as they did before Master Horner’s heart was broken, and it only gets worse when Mr. Kingsbury realizes the cause of his daughter’s distress and decides to

Pedagogues and Performers • 37 interrupt the dramatic scenes by creating one of his own. Rather than functioning as a site of control, the school instead becomes a site of unpredictability, chaos, swift vengeance, and true love. When a student aims his slingshot at the ceiling, the impact brings the letters down from where Miss Bangle hid them in order to keep the master from exonerating himself. Miss Bangle’s deception is uncovered, and the town turns upon her angrily, taking up the schoolmaster’s battle themselves, forcibly ejecting her from the schoolhouse and, by extension, from the community. Lifted into a sleigh by family members, “insensible from terror,” she disappears and returns to the East.56 The schoolroom becomes the site of swift and sudden justice, and the exposure of the role of the pretentious easterner in disturbing the peace of the community convinces the townspeople, the reader, and Ellen of the master’s worth. Both the failed exhibition and the failed courtship are forgiven when the townspeople learn of the deception Master Horner endured, and his restored relationship to the community keeps them from questioning why his heartbreak led their children to perform poorly—clearly, assessment is the last thing on anyone’s mind. This comic sequence of events, from Mr. Kingsbury’s interruption to Miss Bangle’s unconscious exit, provides an interesting twist on the ritual of the exhibition, demonstrating the ways in which an event that served as a comforting tradition could easily become out of control. Kirkland offers a carnivalesque vision of the unpredictability of school life. Though Master Horner’s job and honor are temporarily in danger, both are restored to him with the expulsion of the pretentious easterner. As Denise Jacobs puts it, Master Horner is “a bit of a ninny, but Miss Bangle is an out-and-out villain,” shipped back to the East for the benefit of the community.57 When compared to Miss Bangle’s unwarranted airs and moral weakness, the simplicity of the community, even with its single piano and immature taste for overblown orations, seems preferable. Like Burton and Twain, Kirkland draws a contrast between a cultured audience and a rustic one, but unlike them, she prefers the honesty of the rural folk to the pretensions and malice of the urban easterner who deigns to spend her time among them. Classiness is overrated, and even if the curriculum lacks substance, the simplicity of the school exhibition is much to be preferred over the machinations to which urban women resort for their fun. Kirkland inverts the scenario presented by Burton, Twain, and others like them, ultimately privileging the rural community and its school over any classiness Miss Bangle might have. But the result is much the same. The

38 • Chapter 1 rural community remains as it is with its comic schoolmaster and lackluster curriculum. The ending of the story is happy not because the students have attained knowledge, but rather because the school has fulfilled its social role: thanks to the common school, Ellen and Master Horner get to live happily ever after.58

Exhibition Stories in the Era of Reform By the time reformers began attacking school exhibitions in the 1840s, literary authors had long been fictionalizing them and, as the commonalities between A New-England Tale, The District School as It Was, and “The Schoolmaster’s Progress” show, developing a formula for doing so. Fiction published after the 1840s shares many characteristics with this earlier work. Most narratives proceed through a predictable sequence. Within this formula, however, the stories differ, responding in a variety of ways to the questions of class and curriculum the exhibition raises. Some celebrate rural communities and their students’ substantial learning, while others use the exhibition to critique inadequate curriculum or to poke fun at rural Americans’ efforts to attain class and culture. However, even stories that take opposing stances tend to emphasize the same characteristics, simply using them to different effects. Exhibition stories usually begin with descriptions of the preparations of the schoolhouse and the children. Authors carefully describe the students and teachers cleaning and decorating the classroom, usually with evergreens and flowers, as we saw in Tom Sawyer, as well as the students’ search for costumes and the assembly of a stage. But this description can evidence the high value the community places on education, provide an opportunity to mock the community, or occasionally both, as is the case in Richard Malcolm Johnston’s “Old Friends and New” (1870). The students prepare the schoolroom beautifully and put together an elaborate picnic for the lunch break. The energies the students put into preparing the schoolroom are matched by their academic preparations: “As for the amount of studying that was done, figures and words would be wholly inadequate to calculate and tell of it.” While the children describe their hard work in overblown ways, this isn’t all for show, as they really do prepare in earnest. Johnston gently jokes about their pretensions—one girl is proud to be wearing a ribbon that has come all the way from “Philamadelphy,” for example—but the story ultimately applauds the students’ efforts to improve themselves, viewing the exhibition as a celebration of a school with an excellent curriculum, teacher, and students.59 The

Pedagogues and Performers • 39 student who prepares most seriously and distinguishes himself the most, Brinkly Glisson, is the ambitious son of a poor widow who manages to rise by his own merits, and he represents the potential of the school exhibition—and the common school—at its finest. But even as Johnston highlights Brinkly’s achievements, presenting the common school very positively, the class hierarchy in the story is firmly preserved. No amount of preparation or mastery of the school curriculum can win Brinkly the prize he truly desires, a daughter of one of the first families in the town, Lucy. She crowns the efforts to beautify the schoolroom by constructing a “floral vignette” spelling out “Devoted to learning and virtue,” but none of the locals can figure out what the sign means, an indication of their intellectual limitations.60 They are contrasted with the learned teacher, who leaves teaching at the end of the story to take up his real career, law, which makes him worthy to marry Lucy. Brinkly is left to lament that he lacks the “goodly gifts” his teacher has, his looks and his wealth.61 Despite his exhibition success and academic prowess, no amount of schooling can prepare Brinkly to marry into upper class society: even those who master the school curriculum have little hope of advancing their class status. The locals in “Old Friends and New” attend the school exhibition en masse, and most stories, like Johnston’s, place great weight on the number of people who attend, though attendance can be a sign that a community values education highly or a sign that the locals lack sufficient class and culture to keep the exhibition in proper perspective. In reform-minded fiction, lack of attendance is seen as a sign that rural Americans place insufficient value on schooling. In Daniel Pierce Thompson’s Locke Amsden (1847), discussed in detail in chapter 3, for example, failure to attend the exhibition is a symptom of the community’s unfortunate distaste for common schooling. In true reformist fashion, Locke would prefer the parents to stop by his school on a regular basis, but since they will not, he puts together an exhibition to spark their interest. Coincidentally, the exhibition is planned for the same evening as the “wonderful exhibitions of the far-famed Potter, a professed juggler of those times, who proposed, in the present instance, as usual, to display the astonishing feats of swallowing swords and jack-knives, hatching chickens, frying eggs in his hat, together with an endless variety of other feats never before exhibited, but all equally miraculous.” The use of the same term, exhibition, to describe both Potter’s feats and students’ performances gives a hint as to why reformers preferred staid examinations to lively exhibitions: nothing that takes place in the schoolhouse should be comparable to the likes

40 • Chapter 1 of Potter’s show. The students and their parents forsake the school exhibition in favor of this event, however, much to Locke’s disbelief, as he assumed “no people of sense and character” would prefer such a performance over that of their own children.62 Clearly, the people of Cedarville lack both sense and character—and, what this phrase seeks to conceal, class. Though many of the people of Cedarville are wealthier than Locke, they lack culture and the ability to see the difference between show and substance, a major character flaw, the novel implies. Schoolmistress Rosa Lee faces a similar problem in Mary Jane Holmes’s Meadow Brook (1857), when only her friend and the school trustee come to her exhibition. Like a true reformer, she remarks, for the edification of the readers, that parents “are not sufficiently aware of the great good their occasional presence in the schoolroom will do,” since their visits will incite students to study harder and teachers to work harder.63 While good teachers in reform-minded fiction struggle to get anyone to show up for their exhibitions, poor teachers attract attention for all the wrong reasons, offering authors a chance to flaunt their superiority over the rural communities of which they write. In Eliot McCormick’s “The Prize of Upper Nineveh” (1879), a schoolmistress who neglects the basic branches in favor of Greek and Latin manages to fill an entire church and attract members of the state board of education. Jerry Slack, an imposter without a license in C. W. Bardeen’s Commissioner Hume (1879), likewise attracts a large crowd, including judges, assemblymen, and the school commissioner. These stories lament that people attend exhibitions for the wrong reasons, for showmanship and socializing rather than to assess and applaud meaningful learning. Low attendance is rarely a problem in humorous fiction, and high attendance, even if it is achieved by pandering to lowbrow tastes, is a way of measuring the exhibition’s success for those authors who see the school as a site of bonding, not a means of social climbing. L. Harbour’s “Our School Exhibition” (1885), published in the Youth’s Companion, demonstrates the fun and the usefulness of a theatrical exhibition. In the story, the schoolmaster and his trusted sidekick, Aunt Harriet, decide to get up an exhibition as a fundraiser for the support of an impoverished widow and her children. Aunt Harriet recalls how “the people turned out to see that little old white dog an’ that magic lantern stand on its hind legs last fall,” precisely the kind of popular entertainment Locke Amsden compares unfavorably to a school examination, but instead of mocking the townspeople for their attendance, she seizes on their tastes to raise money for a good cause. She shrewdly suggests, “Have the schoolchildren in it, an’ let ev’ry tow head of ‘em do something. That’ll be

Pedagogues and Performers • 41 sure to bring their pas an’ mas along with their quarters.”64 The master thinks the children will do a terrible job, but he agrees that the event will be wellattended, and that is all that matters. The ends justify the means; it’s worth indulging the low tastes of the community for a good cause, and the fundraiser succeeds grandly. Harbour is aware that local tastes are not high class, but ultimately the narrative refuses to place much weight on this judgment, focusing instead on the moral merits of those who put together the event and the joy it brings to the community. Harbour divorces academic achievement from moral character rather than treating the two as complementary, as reformers did, and ultimately privileges moral merit above superior education. The locals may not have good taste, but they do have good hearts and community spirit, and that is what truly matters. While numbers—and quarters—may be what counts for Aunt Harriet, the quality of the audience also matters to most authors of school stories. The schoolmaster is usually joined by the local doctor, minister, or both in examining the pupils. Just as in scenes of teacher examinations, the particular questions the examiners pose, usually in geography or arithmetic, are included in most stories for the edification or the amusement of the reader. Mrs. M. E. Robinson’s “The School in Perrin:—Or,—The New Teacher” (1854), a reformist narrative published in Flag of Our Union, provides a relatively unique example of examination by committee. When the schoolmaster is traveling to Perrin to take over the school, he meets its former master, who urges him to give up the fruitless enterprise, since the parents in Perrin interfere with the teacher’s work so considerably that no real education can take place. Keeping this counsel in mind, Mr. Kent asks very little of his students in order to keep the school from being violently broken up, a common end to the school term, as we shall see in chapter 2. When the community gathers for the exhibition, however, they quickly realize that the students have learned nothing. The committeeman turns angrily on the teacher, who then unfolds his plan, blaming the parents for raising defiant children and taking their side against former instructors. “If, by this course,” he explains, “I shall have been able to show you the inutility of such management—the great mistake you have committed—the sad wrong you are doing both yourselves and children, the baleful effects of which are now apparent, I shall not be blamed for letting my scholars have their own way.”65 Luckily, the parents do see the light, as readers are meant to, and allow Mr. Kent to begin his work in earnest. Within three months, the school in Perrin is the best in the state: the teacher has reformed the scholars and the curriculum, and, as a result, the esteem in which

42 • Chapter 1 the community is held has greatly increased. Rather than simply mocking the community’s ignorance, as so many authors of school stories do, Robinson schools her readers and Mr. Kent schools the community, particularly its school board members. In addition to posing questions to the students, a committee member, usually the minister, frequently offers some improving remarks at the start or end of the program. Sometimes, these figures are presented as seriously intimidating and worthy of judging the school, particularly in reform fiction. In “The Examination” (1828), an early school story published in the Youth’s Companion, for example, the minister seizes the opportunity to draw parallels between the school examination and the Last Judgment, offering some remarks meant both to edify and to terrify. The aim of the school examination is “to discover what you have been doing good or bad, and what are your present characters and attainments,” but the final judgment will be an even more searching investigation, in which “[y]our whole life must be tried, your very heart must be searched & disclosed to view.”66 Surely no frivolity will be countenanced on the watch of this school trustee, a model for others of his kind. In other stories, the minister, doctor, and other committee members are less strongly delineated but still represented as exercising rightful authority as the educated leaders of the community. As the characters with the highest social status in their communities, they become rightful arbiters of curriculum and gatekeepers of the upper classes. In S. H. Elliot’s “Libbie May, The Young School Teacher” (1856), published in the Connecticut Common School Journal, for example, fifteen-year-old Libbie is terrified when the minister and doctor show up for her exhibition, and she regards it as the achievement of a lifetime when the “committee praised her before the whole school.”67 Earning the approbation of the town’s professionals elevates both the teacher and teaching, and these leaders are presented positively for taking their responsibilities seriously. Perhaps no examiner takes his responsibilities more seriously than Dr. Barrows in Eliot McCormick’s “The Prize of Upper Nineveh” (1879), a reformist narrative published in the Christian Union. The people of Upper Nineveh are lucky enough to obtain the services of a Vassar graduate for their common school, but this is actually a disaster, as the teacher they hire has no grasp on what a common school curriculum should include and, as a result, tries to educate her students above their class. Kate Revere neglects the common branches in favor of Greek and Latin, then plans a splendid exhibition

Pedagogues and Performers • 43 to show off her success. People, including members of the state board of education, come from miles around, especially from the competing town of Babylon Center. The Latin and Greek scholars “fairly wearied the audience with their proficiency,” leading Lawyer Jenkins to exclaim, “Drew a prize, didn’t we?” But Dr. Barrows is determined to show Miss Revere that she isn’t such a prize after all. Seemingly kindly, he compliments her for the pains she has taken teaching branches not usually taught in district schools, and “without questioning at all, at this time, the utility of these branches, or the propriety of giving to them so much attention to the neglect, perhaps, of other important studies,” he asks permission to examine the students in “those more humble studies which will fit them especially for their daily life here in Upper Nineveh.”68 Implicitly drawing a contrast between Kate’s elevated status as a college-educated woman and the much more modest class position of her students, Dr. Barrows proceeds to destroy the favorable impression Kate has created. Kate, he suggests, has prepared her students for a future they can never hope to have, moored as they are to Upper Nineveh. When he examines them, the students flounder on simple spelling words and basic multiplication and division, which provokes an extreme reaction: “[E]veryone was in a wild state of apprehension and excitement; the audience, half on their feet, dejected or delighted according as they lived in Upper Nineveh or Babylon Center; the committee indignant with everybody and especially Dr. Barrows, as being the disturber of their peace; Miss Revere nearly overcome with wrath and mortification; and the children wholly demoralized—the boys sullen and careless, and the girls bathed in tears.”69 This is a rare culmination for a school exhibition, tears rather than laughter. However, McCormick presents Dr. Barrows’s actions as not only fully justified, but heroic. Dr. Barrows is secretly in love with Kate, but he takes his leadership role so seriously that he is willing to decimate her pride. As a female college graduate, Kate is obviously unfit to keep a district school, since she no longer understands the comparatively mundane destinies of the students she teaches, and she had best leave the job in the hands of Miss Onderdonk, a poor woman capable of educating her students to their proper class positions. In the debate over whether schooling was to be a vehicle of class mobility or of social stability, this story comes down firmly on the side of stability. The exhibition represents an opportunity to reinforce the students’ social positions, and when Kate deviates from this script, both she and her students are punished. Though his misogyny and classism are cringe-worthy to today’s reader, Dr. Barrows is meant to be the hero of the story, the ideal school examiner,

44 • Chapter 1 schooling the characters in the story just as McCormick seeks to school his readers. Kate learns her lesson when she attends Miss Onderdonk’s examination three months later and admits to Dr. Barrows that she is a “very capable teacher.”70 In one fell swoop, Dr. Barrows manages to school Kate, the people of Upper Nineveh, and readers on the importance of aligning class and curriculum, and McCormick holds him up as an exemplar for professionals in similar positions, rewarding him with Kate’s affections. “The Prize of Upper Nineveh” highlights the fitness of the school examiner, privileging his perspective as an upper class character with a right to make decisions for those of lower status. But fewer doctors and ministers are presented as God’s gift to common schooling than we might imagine. Frequently, authors speak back to the reformers who sought to increase supervision of teachers. Like “The Prize of Upper Nineveh,” these narratives are ultimately conservative, but they celebrate rather than critique rural life. Turning a critical eye on the examiners, they attack not the pretensions of rural communities but rather those of members of the learned professions. They respond to the intellectual snobbery of stories like McCormick’s with a defensive anti-intellectualism, presenting negative portraits of educated examiners. The doctor who examines Rosa Lee’s school in Mary Jane Holmes’s Meadow Brook (1857), for example, is no Dr. Barrows, though he too is in love with the schoolmistress. Instead of looking out for the good of the school, he uses the examination to try to seduce her, although she is only thirteen. Reverend McSnagley, the minister in Bret Harte’s “The Work on Red Mountain” (1860), discussed in detail in chapter 4, is only a little better. He does his best to discredit M’liss, an orphan under the patronage of the master, at the exhibition, and is so generally detestable that the reader can’t help but agree with M’liss that his eventual murder is for the best. The deacon in Charles Hoyt’s A Midnight Bell (1889), acclaimed as the most popular play of the 1890s, is cut of the same cloth.71 He displays his lack of knowledge at the school exhibition. When one student correctly responds that the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio, for example, he remarks, “Why an Allegheny is one o’them critters they hev down South that bit Fin Never’s leg off” and “Monongahela is whiskey—you can’t fool me on Monongahela.”72 The deacon is a comic character, unfit for his duties as a school examiner, and, as his comment about whiskey shows, perhaps for his duties as a moral leader as well. Yet he still feels free to criticize the schoolmistress, whose work is exemplary. An untitled story published in Ballou’s Monthly Magazine (1882) criticizes examiners still more

Pedagogues and Performers • 45 strongly. The teacher cleverly asks the examiners to come to the board and intentionally commit mathematical errors for the students to correct. The judge, assessor, and tax collector beg off—because not one can solve the problem correctly. In stories that make fools of the examiners, we see issues of class from another perspective, not that of educated outsiders looking down on rural communities but rather of rural communities looking down on those who claim to be above them. Ironically, these figures are called upon to evaluate the school, to distinguish between show and substance, but they themselves are all show and no substance. They claim to be educated, but the only evidence of this education is their arrogant self-assertion. The kind of upward mobility education can provide is devalued; the farmers, laborers, and housewives of the community are privileged over its doctors, lawyers, and ministers. To be sure, anti-intellectualism plays some role in these narratives, but none of the characters parodied actually is an intellectual—they all just pretend to be. These stories respond to the kind of judgment present in “The Prize of Upper Nineveh”: it’s the local community, not educated outsiders, who can truly tell the difference between show and substance, and highly educated characters are all show. Such pretensions are distasteful to the members of each community and to readers, not only because the examiners’ qualifications are more imagined than real, but also because they cut against the understanding of education the stories seek to promote. These doctors and ministers view education as a personal credential, something which, once attained, becomes a permanent form of social capital. However, the community members who support the school (and its exhibitions) view education as a collective experience, something the children share with their teacher, one another, and the community at large. Their vision of education is profoundly local, centering on what schooling can offer a single community, not on how schooling can advance individual students or stabilize the nation. These narratives seek reform, but not school reform—they cast a negative glance on the learned professions and, rather than advocating that teaching become one of them, as reformers did, they question the pretensions of these educated leaders. Instead of considering the role of the school in supporting or constraining social mobility, they devalue such mobility altogether. Discussions of the academic events that follow the examination of the students by educated professionals—spelling bees, math and geography demonstrations, mini-theatricals, declamation, and the reading of

46 • Chapter 1 compositions—likewise reflect authors’ visions of the relationship between class and curriculum, between academic learning and social mobility. The range of activities most stories include highlights the diversity of the curriculum and can show either its shallowness, as in “The Prize of Upper Nineveh,” or its comprehensiveness, as in Johnston’s “Old Friends and New.” Most frequently, a wide variety of studies is seen as a sign that none are mastered in depth. “Pete” (1871), published anonymously in the Overland Monthly, makes precisely this point. The schoolmaster manages to impress his exhibition audience, but he knows the truth of the students’ ignorance. He drills the students in grammar and, when his “grammatical battalion” is exhibited for parents, they “retired awe-struck at their children’s learning, and ashamed at their own ignorance.” As soon he as stops drilling them, however, “the whole battalion showed sign of retrograding into grammatical darkness.” The same is true of their studies in geography: although visitors often “retired humiliated at their own geographical ignorance,” most of the children do not know what a map is. The schoolmaster offers an explanation for the students’ failures: “I was to them what, in civilization, the superior race is to the inferior. One originates, the other copies; one leads, the other follows. Snuff out the Caucasian, and in a generation those who borrow from him, those who shine by his reflected light, will go back to their native barbarism.”73 Most of the teacher’s students actually are white, though some are Mexican, but the reference to race here is largely metaphorical, a way of distinguishing between the educated teacher and the hopeless students reliant on him for their knowledge. The narrator implies that just as racial difference (in his view) cannot be erased, neither can the differences between the teacher and his pupils. Their school exhibitions are exhibitions of their inferior humanity, not of their teacher’s failings. No need to worry about the school enhancing students’ social mobility: these students aren’t going anywhere. Nor is this logic unique to “Pete,” which elicits laughter at the expense of rural Californians. Sally McLean Greene’s Cape Cod Folks (1881) makes a similar point about the residents of rural Massachusetts and their inability to master the school curriculum. When the superintendent arrives at Miss Hungerford’s school by surprise, the students try to help her by appearing to be studying, but many hold their books upside down, ruining the illusion. He questions them briefly, just to prove they know nothing, but instead of chastising Miss Hungerford, he blames the children. He confides to the teacher, “Their minds [. . .] have no receptivity. They must originate, or they

Pedagogues and Performers • 47 are naught. Parents and children—they are all the same. I am convinced that there is no scholarship to be established here.”74 In the eyes of the school examiner, it does not matter that Miss Hungerford is unqualified for her position because the students are incapable of learning. Though they fail at the examination, the townspeople enjoy their school exhibition: since education is hopeless, why not have fun? While Cape Cod Folks indulges an affection for show over substance, more frequently such tastes are criticized in school stories, particularly in discussions of declamation and the reading of compositions, which are the chief focus of most exhibition scenes. These activities were so essential to exhibition success that anthologies were compiled to aid teachers in selecting pieces for performance; as early as 1835 teaching manuals offered suggestions for choosing.75 In The School-master’s Friend, for example, Theodore Dwight offers extensive advice for choosing pieces “perfectly intelligible to the young, yet not too childish to please or improve the old,” “full of good taste, good sense, and sound principles, and pure feeling.” He counsels against pushing the children to express feelings they are not ready for, since they can “never do any thing but caricature them.”76 Despite such admonitions, although young children “cannot conceive the feelings of a Roman general, or a Grecian or British orator,” this does not stop them from performing such speeches in school fiction.77 In some cases, their efforts are presented sympathetically. In Johnston’s “Old Friends and New,” for example, the boys earn great applause for their patriotic speeches and poetic recitations, even when their style does not quite fit the content, because the aim of the event is to reinforce the students’ sense of pride and motivate them to continue learning. Even so, the community members are capable of distinguishing good speaking from poor speaking: they recognize Brinkly’s simple speech on the value of education as far superior to his classmates’ overblown Revolutionary addresses.78 The same is true of the audience at the school exhibition in Louise Coffin Jones’s “A Hoosier Idyl” (1885). Celebrating the children and their teachers proves more important than correcting errors in style and execution. Community bonding trumps academic excellence, and the exhibition ties children more strongly to their communities rather than encouraging them to rise above them. But while sympathetic observers present students’ speaking as fun and motivational, many critics of the school exhibition make precisely this activity the object of their satire, sometimes with reformist intentions, sometimes

48 • Chapter 1 simply to mock rural communities. That these two options frequently blur into one another speaks volumes about reformers’ understanding—or lack thereof—of the communities they sought to reshape in their own image. Some narratives focus on the difficulties declamation posed for students, as Stephen Crane does in “Making an Orator” (1899). Jimmie Trescott develops a lifelong hatred for public speaking because of his teacher’s aggressive attempts to force him to perform “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The exercise rewards “[l]ittle blockheads who could learn eight lines of conventional poetry, and could get up and spin it rapidly at their classmates” while traumatizing those who were “most capable of expressing themselves” and “most sensitive to the power of speech.” Sensitive Jimmie develops a “finished incapacity” for public speaking that lasts until he dies, along with a hatred of schooling and the inability to focus on his other studies, scarcely an ideal result of practicing oratory.79 Other narratives criticize the choice of pieces, highlighting how ill-suited they are for children who do not understand classical history or adult life. Curriculum should align with the needs and futures of the students, these stories imply, and when it does not, the results are both laughable and concerning. Critics worried about the repetitiveness of students’ performances and their inability to fully comprehend what they performed. In Schoolroom Poets, Angela Sorby demonstrates how a classroom context could shape the meaning of a text by turning it into a “pedagogical tool,” an “occasion for social exchange,” and a theatrical performance.80 Some authors realize that reinterpretations are what make the texts meaningful to their audiences. Mark Twain does, for example: while Tom Sawyer may not understand Patrick Henry’s political commitments, the “Give me liberty or give me death” speech is perfect for him nonetheless. What more does Tom want throughout the novel than (childish) liberty and (temporary) death? But it is precisely this kind of transformation, the substitution of freedom from Aunt Polly for freedom from colonial control, that troubled critics of declamation. When they complain that children misinterpret their pieces, they are concerned about students understanding the works in their original contexts, not within their new context, the exhibition. Once again, a concern about curriculum becomes a concern about class. These authors expect teachers to act as conservators of literary and historical meaning, refusing to allow the public to reinterpret important texts and resisting the democratization of knowledge that mass education seemed to promise. C. W. Bardeen’s Commissioner Hume (1879) typifies this kind of thinking.

Pedagogues and Performers • 49 In a brilliant single paragraph, Bardeen takes aim at most of the school exhibition’s greatest hits: The Boy always stood on the Burning Deck, while a Soldier of the Legion lay dying at Algiers, and Sheridan was Twenty Miles Away. Friends, Romans and Countrymen lent him their ears, although He came not there to Talk, for they called him Chief and did well to call him Chief who for a dozen years had been annually personated by the most chicken-breasted boy in school. The girls [.  .  .] swayed to and fro, occasionally sucking a finger between the stanzas as they assured the audience that at Midnight, in his Guarded Tent, the Turk lay dreaming, Life was Real, Life was Earnest, and if they chanced to fall below Demosthenes or Cicero, a Voice replies, far up the Height, Mrs. Bardell, gentlemen, was a Widow; yes, gentleman a Widow. [ . . . T]he villagers listened with a sort of wondering amazement to see Tommy Brown who was spanked yesterday for stealing sugar, declare that he knew not what others might say, but as for him, give him liberty or give him death, while Molly Tweddle, who generally displays her stocking down at the heel, calls to bold Charlie Macree to come over, come over the river to she.81 In the course of this paragraph, Bardeen invokes a great many of the pieces that commonly appear in school stories, managing to cover, if not every popular piece, then each popular genre: patriotic speeches, classical orations, and American and British poetry. Unlike Twain, Bardeen fails to be amused by the sugar thief’s redefinition of liberty. The humor here arises instead from Bardeen’s parodying of these choices, which only works if the reader recognizes the texts from the snippets provided. Being able to identify the pieces on Bardeen’s list requires one form of cultural capital—but understanding them, he makes clear, requires another. This passage highlights the misalignment of the pieces with the student’s characters (the “chicken-breasted” boy announcing his authority) and their inability to perform them as mature orators (the girls sucking their thumbs). The members of the audience, however, fail to notice the unintended comedy of these performances, though the recitations are “silly and inappropriate and ineffably weak.” Instead, the residents of the “sleepy country hamlet” enjoy them, as “you and I take a new pleasure in hearing Fatinitza if we happen to spend Sunday at the same hotel with the opera troupe.”82 The locals enjoy the exhibition

50 • Chapter 1 only because they don’t know any better. But a cultured person, the kind who appreciates opera and stays in hotels that attract its stars, would know what a ridiculous display the exhibition is. Generously, Bardeen includes the reader in this second group, and together we get to look down on the locals. What starts out as a critique of the constant repetition of the same tired pieces and the children’s inability to perform them properly, a criticism of curriculum and instruction, becomes a class issue, as people of culture are pitted against those lacking their advantages. Bardeen here plays the part of Dr. Barrows in “The Prize of Upper Nineveh,” an educated leader capable of diagnosing problems the rural community is incapable of noticing. His authority as teacher to his readers is contrasted to the illegitimate authority of the teacher in the novel, who forged his teaching license. Rural Americans don’t just need better schoolteachers, the story implies, but also stronger leadership from cultured men, whose authority is far more legitimate than that of many who find themselves behind the teacher’s desk.83 Discussions of declamation are often followed by the awarding of prizes, or, at the very least, enthusiastic applause, especially in those narratives that celebrate the achievements of rural schoolchildren. Though many exhibition narratives resemble Bardeen’s and satirize the performers, a few use the awarding of prizes as an opportunity to highlight the school’s ability to help deserving children achieve social mobility. The most notable example is Annie Cary’s “A Story for Boys” (1871), published in the Maine Farmer. Cary skips straight to the end of the exhibition, focusing on the prize ceremony. The best scholar, Minor, is unhappy to be honored because he is ashamed to go up on the platform with bare feet, since his classmates tease him about his poverty. When his turn to receive his prize arrives, he can barely control his anxiety, but this single academic event sets him up for life. A lawyer is so impressed with his performance that he offers to adopt Minor, to “educate and do for him as he would if he were his own son.” Minor later attends college and graduates with the highest honors. The story gives very little detail about Minor; he is a kind of “every boy” meant to inspire all young readers. And for him, the school is a direct route out of poverty, which is the story’s message. It concludes, “Because a boy has not at his order money enough to purchase food, raiment, books and instruction, it is never a sufficient reason why he should despair of acquiring knowledge.”84 The common school proves to be a “great equalizer” and the exhibition a means for the top scholars to receive their due. This reform-minded narrative cuts against the disavowal of the connection

Pedagogues and Performers • 51 between schooling and social mobility present in many of the school stories discussed above. Perhaps the difference here is one of audience: the title, “A Story for Boys,” implies a child audience, and the story is imagined as a means of teaching schoolchildren the rewards of performing well at school. While Cary tries to convince children to try their hardest, most authors of common school narratives use the school exhibition to demonstrate that even if students do try their hardest, the school will pose little social threat. The exhibition becomes a fitting way to think through the ends of education, coming, as it does, at the end of the school term. In the eyes of some authors, schooling should mean thoroughly mastering a meaningful curriculum; for others, the school’s function is primarily social and the exhibition exemplifies its community functions. Whether they parody the common school, its poorly conceived curriculum, and its laughable students and teachers or celebrate the school as a center of community life, exhibition narratives raise anxieties about whether or not schooling will allow individuals to change their social status. By posing questions about student achievement, these narratives consider the possibility that schooling will allow for social mobility, but their endings are generally conservative, leaving rural schoolchildren where they are, ensconced in cozy communities or safely distant from the elites who feel licensed to judge them.

Redefining Meaningful Learning: The Case of the Spelling Bee The contrast between representations of school exhibitions and representations of spelling bees highlights the way in which exhibition scenes become freighted with anxieties about class. The spelling bee was intimately tied to the school exhibition, and the two events often appear in the same story, as in Kirkland’s “The Schoolmaster’s Progress,” or even as part of the same event, as in Tom Sawyer. In The Red Shanty Boys (1884), Theron Brown explains that the school exhibition actually grew out of the spelling bee. By “time and the logic of circumstances,” the bee was “altered, enlarged, and amended, until the spelling constituted a mere nucleus for a miscellany of performances more amusing than instructive.”85 But though the spelling bee and the school exhibition share historical roots, in school fiction these scenes tend to serve different purposes. Collectively, exhibition stories offer a relatively bleak (if darkly humorous) picture of student achievement and rural schooling, despite the best efforts of some authors to present schools in a positive light. Spelling bee narratives, by contrast, are characteristically sunny. Class issues are muted

52 • Chapter 1 in these scenes, which instead celebrate rural life and the role of the school within it. The differences between how the two events are portrayed, given their common roots, makes reading them side-by-side particularly illuminating: those critical of the academic achievements of rural communities frequently turn their attention to the exhibition, while those who wish to defend the school’s social functions capitalize on the spelling bee to do so. Reformers criticized spelling bees as rewarding memory, not understanding, but fiction speaks back to this judgment, presenting the spelling bee as a considerable source of joy for both participants and readers. Like exhibitions, spelling bees entered the American schoolroom in the late eighteenth century and drew the ire of reformers by the mid-nineteenth. But despite reformers’ efforts, rural Americans loved the spelling bee. In fact, David Grambs contends that the spelling bee could be considered the “national pastime” in the nineteenth century, though its popularity waxed and waned.86 Spelling bees were particularly well attended in the first quarter of the century and returned to popularity in the 1870s, thanks in part to nostalgia and in part to the widespread popularity of Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster. The event earned the name “spelling bee” after the revival in the 1870s, having previously been called the “spelling school,” in an effort to assuage the Puritan conscience and frame the event as purely educational.87 “Bee,” on the other hand, evokes the event’s community functions, aligning it with quilting bees and the like.88 Interest in bees varied geographically: bees were popular in New England in the first quarter of the century, in the Midwest in the antebellum period, and across the country in the 1870s,89 so much so that newspaper accounts frequently detailed every word spelled or misspelled.90 Despite the spelling bee’s popularity, like the exhibition it had its detractors among reformers. The bee emerged in part thanks to the tremendous influence of Noah Webster’s spelling book. Webster advocated the alphabet method for learning to read and spell: students first learned to name letters, then to pronounce syllables, and finally to spell words.91 Reformers did not take kindly to this approach, as it emphasized spelling over understanding.92 With characteristic hyperbole, Horace Mann lamented the effects of a child’s encounter with the alphabet and the spelling book: “There stands in silence and death, the stiff, perpendicular rows of characters, lank, stark, immovable, without form or comeliness, and, as to signification, wholly void. They are skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions, and hence it is no wonder that the children look and feel so death-like, when compelled to face them.”93

Pedagogues and Performers • 53 In contrast to the high spirits and camaraderie associated with spelling bees in fiction, Mann pictures learning spelling Webster’s way as equivalent to a forced encounter with the undead. Nor did this acrimony toward spelling by rote abate over time. When the spelling bee was revived in the 1870s, Professor Youmans wrote to the American Educational Monthly to warn that the revival was likely to result in new “recruits” for the insane asylum.94 Others worried that spelling itself, regardless of how it was taught, distracted from more important knowledge. One curmudgeon wrote to the New York Times, for example, that “[i]f the young lady who [. . .] won the frosted cake at Brooklyn the other evening by spelling, had received it for the skill she showed in being able to make such another, it would be of better promise for her and for her future husband.”95 But like exhibitions, spelling bees were a school tradition that refused to disappear in the face of reformers’ critiques. As the spelling bee was attacked, literary authors stepped into the breach, debating and defending the bee’s purposes. Exhibition narratives, as we have seen, are relatively complex, rife with class anxieties, leaving readers to tease out whether we are laughing at or with the participants. Stories of spelling bees, on the other hand, focus on fun, celebrating the social functions of the bee while sometimes gently mocking its intellectual pretensions. Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster, the novel credited with bringing the spelling bee back into vogue in the 1870s, provides a case in point. Eggleston acknowledges the intellectual and social benefits of the bee in a rural community with no “lyceum lecture and debating club,” even as he agrees with reformers that it’s rather worthless to be able to spell words one cannot define. The narrator jests, “What do you want to know the meaning of a word for? Words were made to spelled, and men were probably created that they might spell them.”96 The ridiculousness of the enterprise is exemplified by Squire Hawkins, who says that he puts the spelling book before the Bible, for “if it wurn’t fer spellin’-books and sich occasions as these, where would the Bible be?”97 Promoted by such luminaries as Squire Hawkins, spelling proves to be a remarkably nonthreatening form of cultural capital, one authors freely acknowledge that rural Americans possess. Despite the humor that suffuses this scene and others like it, however, spelling is also sincerely valued by the characters. School fiction is populated by an array of truly gifted spellers, and all bee participants display a level of concentration and commitment that reformers tried in vain to spur for more useful academic exercises. In Dean Dudley’s Pictures of Life in England and America (1851), for example, not “one

54 • Chapter 1 in a hundred” words is misspelled.98 In many stories, the spellers are so talented that they make it through the entire spelling book without defeat. In Benjamin F. Taylor’s “Winter Nights” (1854), “[d]ictionaries are turned over— memories are ransacked” until finally only one speller remains.99 Schoolmaster Ralph Hartsook proves the equal of the pride of Hoopole County, Jim Phillips, in The Hoosier Schoolmaster, and the master of ceremonies must use a list of newly coined words to bring the event to its culmination. Thus, it’s a pardonable offense when the schoolmaster misspells “daguerreotype,” though Hannah, an indentured servant, gets it right. She gains everyone’s sympathy, including Ralph’s, who deserts his own cause when he sees Hannah’s “rich, womanly nature.”100 Sam Whitsitt argues that its egalitarianism, which this scene highlights, is one explanation for the spelling bee’s popularity. Anyone who could get his hands on the blue-backed speller had a chance at local fame, and this appealed to Americans striving for social capital in a fledging society.101 Unlike in exhibition stories, in which the triumph of an impoverished student can be unsettling, representations of spelling bees usually celebrate this kind of achievement. For example, in “An Incident in School Life” (1857), published in the Connecticut Common School Journal, a “poor little boy of ten summers” who sits up at night studying with his mother spells down competitors from two schools.102 (Interestingly, this story appears in a reform journal, not a publication we would expect to embrace the spelling bee.) The story celebrates the boy’s accomplishment as evidence of the democratic tendencies of the common school. Perhaps such tendencies are nonthreatening in narratives about spelling bees, as they are not in exhibition stories, because spelling knowledge is a kind of nonsense, particularly if participants do not know the meaning of the words they spell. While good spelling may impress friends and potential partners, it only provides significant social capital within the rural community—it is difficult to imagine a young person using spelling skills to significantly advance his/her class status outside of it. The way spelling competitions worked may also help to explain this distinction. Spelling bees were a team sport that frequently brought together two schools from different neighborhoods to spell against each other. Thus, what’s at stake is not only personal achievement but also community pride. While exhibition stories often highlight the divide between cosmopolitan Americans and their rural counterparts, spelling bee narratives are interested in rural communities’ relationships to one another: success at the spelling bee becomes a way for one rural community to assert its superiority over others like

Pedagogues and Performers • 55 it. As such, these stories are rife with martial metaphors. In “Winter Nights,” for example, a “war of words” is to be waged, which leads to a great deal of spelling review, “preparatory to the grand melee.”103 In The Red Shanty Boys, the competitors are “combatants” “fit for duty,” working hard to survive the “syllabic cannonade,” while the teacher consults the geography book for “ammunition.”104 By employing metaphors of war, authors of school fiction borrow the vocabulary school reformers used to magnify their own struggles and triumphs and redeploy it to different ends, presenting themselves as warriors, not, as reformers did, as those who needed conquering.105 After detailing the spelling, narratives discuss the termination of the contest, frequently in favor of a woman and her team. Some stories flatly state this is always the case. In Pictures of Life in England and America, Dean Dudley remarks that the side containing the majority of the girls always emerges victorious.106 Newspaper accounts agree that a girl always stands alone in the end.107 This is the case even in the earliest school stories. The District School as It Was contains a spelling bee in addition to its school exhibition, discussed above. According to Burton, girls are likely to outspell their male classmates “in consequence of receiving a little more help from mother nature” in the form of a memory “fitted for catching and holding words.”108 Of course, another explanation exists: girls spent more time in school than their male counterparts, who were frequently called away for farm work or paid labor. And school fictions provide yet another explanation for this outcome: the role of romance in shaping the spelling bee experience. Even schoolmaster Ralph Hartsook considers throwing the game as his attraction to Hannah grows. Nor was this temptation limited to young men. In John Greenleaf Whittier’s wildly popular poem “In School-Days” (1871), a little girl confesses that she wishes she had misspelled the winning word to protect the pride of the boy she loves: “‘I’m sorry that I spelt the word:/ I hate to go above you,/ Because,’—the brown eyes lower fell,—/‘Because, you see, I love you!’”109 As these examples demonstrate, although spelling was an important component of the evening, the spelling bee could also be a major social event, one that highlighted the role of the school as the center of the community. By around 1800, bees were moved out of the school day and into the evening so the entire community could attend.110 Bees quickly became an important venue for flirtation and courtship. As Eggleston explains in The Hoosier Schoolmaster, “What a full-dress party is to Fifth Avenue, a spelling-school is to Hoopole County.”111 Like C. W. Bardeen, who compares the school exhibition to the opera, Eggleston compares the low cultural amusements of

56 • Chapter 1 Hoopole County to the high cultural amusements of Fifth Avenue, but to different effect. Rather than privileging Fifth Avenue over rural Indiana, Eggleston recognizes that dancing and the spelling bee ultimately serve similar social purposes, purposes that bridge the gap between New York socialites and flirtatious Hoosiers. Because the spelling bee is primarily a social event, every aspect of the evening is tied to personal rather than academic considerations. For example, the captains of the teams are always two young men, and they frequently use the bee as a means of settling romantic rivalries. In Pictures of Life in England and America, the prettiest girls are chosen first, a “pardonable partiality.”112 The same logic prevails in Benjamin F. Taylor’s “Winter Nights.” Since John is the leader, Jane, a pretty girl but a poor speller, is chosen, because “a battle lost with Jane by his side, would be sweeter than a victory won, without her.”113 In The Old Log Schoolhouse, the spelling bee forces a young woman to choose between potential suitors. “If the young lady whose name was uttered did not choose to sit beside the young man” who chose her for his side, “etiquette had established a law that she should not spell a word that night.”114 And the socializing only increases after the spelling ends. The conclusion of “Winter Nights” is representative: “Then comes the hurrying and bundling, the whispering and glancing, the pairing off and the tumbling in. There are hearts that flutter and hearts that ache; ‘mittens’ that are not worn, secret hopes that are not realized, and fond looks that are not returned.”115 In “Waiting Upon Sue” (1875), one boy’s hopes are dashed when the master borrows his horse and doesn’t return with it, but in the end he gets the girl. The ending of the spelling bee in Charles Howard Shinn’s “Shasta Lilies” (1885) is rather more dramatic. When the man she loves arrives at the spelling bee with another woman, the top speller in the class misses one of the first words so she can go outside to weep. Ralph walks Hannah home in The Hoosier Schoolmaster, and most stories end similarly. These endings emphasize the community functions of the spelling bee, functions that reformers’ distaste for such events too easily discounted. If spelling words he cannot define helps a young man to secure the affections of a desirable young woman, maybe spelling knowledge isn’t so useless after all. In these stories, the spelling bee helps young people not to advance their class status or rise above their community, but rather to secure their status as adult members of that community. The spelling bee helps to ensure the endurance of rural communities, providing a venue for bonding through competition and an excuse for romantic interactions. In contrast to the criticism

Pedagogues and Performers • 57 and anxiety with which authors freight exhibition narratives, few are the authors who seek to spoil this fun by prosing about the uselessness of spelling or the foolishness of rural Americans. As such, these stories teach readers far different lessons about the ends of schooling than exhibition narratives do, responding to concerns about curriculum and achievement by highlighting the school’s importance as a social, not merely an academic, institution.

• To assess, to teach, to amuse, to bring people together: the multiplicity of purposes the school exhibition and spelling bee served mirrors the balancing act authors faced in crafting compelling, entertaining, and instructive common school narratives, which perhaps contributes to the longevity of these scenes in school fiction. While representations of the spelling bee tend to emphasize community and amusement, exhibition narratives dramatize anxieties about curriculum and class, posing questions about what schooling aimed to accomplish at both the personal and the social levels. Despite their differences, both sets of narratives highlight the importance of the school as the center of the community, a fitting site from which to assess the merits and limitations of rural Americans. This understanding of the school permeates common school narratives more broadly, particularly those that depict another ritual of common school life: the violent expulsion of teachers. While spelling bees may be metaphorical wars of words, for many a fictional schoolmaster, violence in the classroom is far from figurative. In exhibition narratives, cultured elites judge the attainments and aptitudes of rural Americans, usually negatively. Narratives of school violence reverse this gaze, highlighting the power of rural Americans to judge and dismiss those educated outsiders who deign to call themselves teachers, as we will see in chapter 2.

2

Combatants and Collaborators

While narratives of school exhibitions often portray teachers as ignorant and unfit, some stories paint a much darker picture of the schoolmaster, as not merely intellectually weak, but also as morally depraved, driven by sadism and hungry for power. Take, for example, Israel Meadows, the schoolmaster in Richard Malcolm Johnston’s “The Goosepond School” (1871), who has a remarkable talent for designing fresh and humiliating forms of corporal punishment. For a minor disturbance, he punishes a dozen students by making them play “circus,” forcing them to trot around him in a circle while he whips their calves. When this amusement ends, two boys are ordered to “go to horsin’,” one simulating the horse and the other the rider while the rider is whipped.1 Although Israel Meadows is an extreme case, the centrality that Johnston affords corporal punishment is typical of common school narratives. As Richard Brodhead has argued, scenes of corporal punishment are “endemic” in antebellum education writing.2 Johnston’s story demonstrates that even after the Civil War corporal punishment continued to be central to imaginings of the one-room school. And it remains so today—contemporary discussions of nineteenth-century schooling share this focus on discipline, and historians agree that corporal punishment was a commonplace and central feature of life in the common school.3 We are familiar, then, with thinking of nineteenth-century schools as places where children routinely faced violence, ranging from mundane forms of punishment, like whipping and feruling, to innovative methods of inflicting shame and pain. But “The Goosepond School,” and the story of violence in the one-room school more broadly, does not end with violence against students. One of the students, Brinkly Glisson, confronts Meadows and refuses

Combatants and Collaborators • 59 to be whipped.4 When Meadows attempts to strike him, Brinkly overpowers him and hits his head against the floor until the teacher begs for mercy. Meadows is thus permanently forced from the school. At first, the other students are shocked: “A schoolmaster whipped! beat! choked! his head bumped! and that by one of his pupils!” Because they have been conditioned to accept Meadows’s abuse, the students are initially “terrified, and to some extent miserable, at the sight of so much power, so much authority, so much royalty dishonored and laid low,” and they look upon Brinkly as upon a regicide until another boy congratulates him, remarking that he would rather have beaten Meadows “than to have been the man that fooled the Tory in the Revolutionary War.”5 Finally grasping their freedom, the students rejoice, and one violently beats a chair, cursing it, and, by extension, his teacher. Brinkly fears telling his mother what he has done, but he need not have worried: she finds his actions glorious and honorable. This drastic turn of events—the move from the master inflicting violence on his students to his students inflicting violence on him—is the other, less told half of the story of violence in the nineteenth-century school. Johnston’s story shares many characteristics with other narratives of school violence: the commingling of symbolic violence (beating the chair) and real violence (beating the master), the image of the master as a deposed king and his assailant as a war hero, the eventual approbation with which the community responds, and the role of the “big boys” as ringleaders of rebellion. Surprisingly, in fiction violence is routinely turned not just on those masters who rather deserve it, like Meadows, but also on exemplars who know the difference between licking and learning. In common school narratives, schoolboys seek liberty from tyrannical schoolteachers, as well as from those far less frightening, quite as frequently as they demand liberty or death on the exhibition stage. Because reformers emphasized the importance of mass education in ensuring social stability, scenes of violence against teachers have a strange place in the history of schooling. Quelling violence was a major goal for common schooling. As one reformer put it, only religion and education served as security that “mob-law” will not “extend over the whole country, sweeping before it the barriers which have hitherto guarded the rights of property and the comforts and privileges of social and civil life” to “mingle all in one common ruin.”6 Given the prevalence of this justification for common schooling, scenes of school violence challenge the logic of reformers. To be sure, in some ways these representations simply reflect fact.7 But they also raise significant

60 • Chapter 2 questions about schooling: Is control of the schoolroom to be gained and maintained by violence or by consent, by physical strength or by intellectual acquirements? These narratives and their authors, as well as the real-life events that inspired them, offer a counterbalance to the idealized visions of school reformers, who imagined schools uniting communities while integrating them into a broader American culture. Often, when the communities in common school narratives are united, they are united against the schoolmaster rather than by him, and the results are not moral uplift and Americanization, but scorched eyebrows, bloody fists, and attempted murder. While the violence inflicted on Israel Meadows has a clear cause, his own violence, more than the fate of a single teacher is at stake in this scene and the many scenes like it that appear in common school narratives over the course of the century. By highlighting tensions between specific groups of students and their teachers, such scenes dramatize the tension between outsider teachers and the communities they serve more broadly, offering a window into the tension between the local and the central, between community control of schooling and centralized oversight. Though in reality most teachers were locals or relatives of locals, this is not the picture that narratives of school violence present. Instead, the teacher is nearly always an outsider, usually from a more populated and educated place. Unlike narratives of school exhibitions, which tend to judge the teacher alongside the students and community, narratives of school violence highlight the distance between the community’s values and those espoused by the schoolmaster, seen as a representative of outside influences attempting to refashion rural communities. As “The Goosepond School” demonstrates, school violence was closely tied to school discipline, and the variety of ways common school narratives resolve these scenes reflect the authors’ views on school government, what we today call classroom management. Methods of school government, particularly corporal punishment, were hotly debated starting in the 1840s.8 Beneath practical concerns over whether or not students could be made to mind without physical punishment was a political concern. Critics of corporal punishment worried such punishment was inappropriate in a democracy and that “brutalized victims” might jeopardize the social order “by becoming angry and vengeful,” while proponents argued that students should learn to submit to government from an early age.9 The language of this debate evidences its broader implications. For example, Horace Mann argued that, given “the turbulence of democracy,” corporal punishment should be used as little as possible.10 Rather than through violence, Mann believed teachers could motivate

Combatants and Collaborators • 61 students by engaging their “social and filial affections.”11 Opposing this view, the American Institute of Instruction claimed that a “[s]ociety, where teachers have not the power to enforce morality in the schools, is in the condition where it cannot punish treason against the State.”12 As the language of both the proponents and opponents of corporal punishment demonstrates, commentators tied the issue of school government directly to broader issues of government. This language also demonstrates the ways in which the role of the teacher was being negotiated. Likening disobedience in school to treason implies that the teacher is an agent of the state, but asserting, as reformers did, that teachers could discipline through “filial affection” implies that the teacher operates in loco parentis, a concern taken up in chapter 4. Is the teacher to be treated with the obedience due to the government or the affection due to parents? This confusion over the teacher’s role is at the heart of narratives of violence against teachers. Questions of what it means to submit to a teacher’s authority slide into questions of what it means to submit to authority more broadly, to be a citizen of a community and a nation. To many historians of the common school, the emphasis school fictions place on conflict between the teacher and the community will scarcely come as a surprise. Historical arguments about the evolution of common schooling tend to fall into one of two categories: those that emphasize the values most Americans shared with reformers, values that led to their willing acquiescence to common schooling, and those that emphasize conflict and the imposition of the school as an agent of social control. Rather than presenting the common school as an institution unquestionably embraced or unhesitatingly resisted, common school fictions dramatize a range of reactions that fall between these two poles. In fiction, school violence becomes one avenue for the continual renegotiation of the relationship between teacher and community, between rural Americans and the outsiders who wish to shape their educational futures. School violence shows us the extent to which schools, rather than serving merely as sites of control, were out of control, spaces where multiple groups and individuals vied for authority. The resolutions of this negotiation differ from narrative to narrative, highlighting local variations in this profoundly local institution. In some school stories, community members eagerly support their teacher, much as consensus historians have imagined. In others, they bitterly oppose his attempts to alter their way of life, battling for control as historians have claimed more recently. But common school narratives also offer a third option, highlighting that control is something that could be shared by teacher and community: in lieu of ready-made consensus

62 • Chapter 2 or unending conflict, these narratives demonstrate the importance of community consent to the success of common schooling.

Answering Force with Force: Governing By Fear Although corporal punishment and the idea of governing students through fear came increasingly under fire over the course of the nineteenth century, some common school narratives still advocate physical intimidation as a means of school government and an answer to student violence. These stories present the school as a means of social control, privileging the schoolmaster and the values he represents over those of the community he serves. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner (1861), for example, takes great relish in the schoolmaster’s physical strength and his ability to force his students into submission.13 The novel offers readers a detailed recent history of the Pigwacket Center district school, where Bernard Langdon finds himself employed, rehearsing many details common to representations of school violence. From the start, the link between school government and national government is made clear. The two masters before Bernard, both of whom were violently forced from the school, are pictured as undemocratic rulers who fell prey to the designs of the “big boys,” representatives of a “fierce democracy.”14 Holmes’s sympathy does not lie with these “democratic” leaders, however, who are too ignorant to distinguish between a poor teacher and a good one and thus treat all educational authority as unjust. Instead, the community, its school, and its masters are satirized. The community may array itself against these teachers, but our sympathies lie with neither the community nor the teachers, as the community is ignorant and the teachers unfit. Like many authors of exhibition narratives, Holmes humorously serves up a rural community for knowing readers. His caricature of the first schoolmaster, Master Weeks, is representative: the teacher is “a slender youth from a country college, under-fed, thin-blooded, sloping-shouldered, knock-kneed, straight-haired, weak-bearded, pale-eyed, wide-pupilled, half-colored”—in short, a close, though underfed, cousin to Ichabod Crane. When he tries to punish Abner Briggs, a “great hulking fellow, who had been bred to butchering,” he finds himself thrown across the floor, and from that moment “his ferule was broken.” The narrator muses, “the best man, not exactly in the moral sense, but rather in the material, and more especially in the muscular point of view, is very apt to have the best of it.”15 If Master Weeks is unfit to discipline by force, the novel implies, he is unfit for the schoolroom as well.

Combatants and Collaborators • 63 Nor is the next master an improvement: the students manage to gaslight him out of his position without actually laying a hand on him. Master Pigeon is a “dreadfully nervous kind of man” who “walked on tiptoe, started at sudden noises, was distressed when he heard a whisper, had a quick, suspicious look, and was always saying, ‘Hush!’ and putting his hands to his ears.”16 The boys quickly recognize this weakness and exploit it to the utmost. The anxiety proves too much for Master Pigeon, so he vacates his position. Again, the students win and the master loses, but this story does not celebrate the students’ victories, presenting them not as hard-fought battles against injustice, like Brinkly’s victory over Israel Meadows in “The Goosepond School,” but rather as signs that neither the community nor its teachers deserve our sympathies. Rather than defending the values and ideals of their community, these students simply take advantage of others’ weaknesses, ridding themselves of poor educators without covering themselves with glory in the process. Were these the only schoolmasters in the novel, these chapters would be a prime example of a satire of teachers in the spirit of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and The District School as It Was, discussed in chapter 1, but Master Pigeon is replaced by Bernard Langdon. Rather than bringing with him a new model of school government that turns the tide in his favor, Bernard pursues the same course as his predecessors: he answers force with force. The key difference, however, is that he is actually good at it, and his use of force is just because he is superior to the community in every way, from book smarts to physical appearance. While many common school narratives critique school trustees for prioritizing muscle over brains, Holmes rather agrees with them on the importance of this qualification, provided it is joined by others. So do the prettiest girls in town: Bernard’s first misstep as a teacher is kissing village belle Alminy on the cheek, thus sparking Abner’s ire. When Abner arrives at school with his dog, Bernard demands he put it out and, when the student fails to comply, Bernard literally kicks the dog out, then demands its owner follow. When Abner refuses, Bernard rolls up his sleeves, exposing a pair of gold buttons worn by an ancestor in the French and Indian War, a sign of the political implications of the school insurrection. He pitches Abner over a desk onto the floor, finishing him with a single blow. Abner leaves the school, never to return, and due to the expulsion of the leading troublemaker and Bernard’s fabulous teaching skills, “everything was reduced to order,” to the delight of the school committee.17 Answering force with force works, but only because Bernard is superior in physical strength

64 • Chapter 2 to his predecessors and exceptional in other ways, from his learning to his appearance to his manners. And the idealized relationship between master and community doesn’t last: Bernard leaves Pigwacket Center after only few weeks, rather like his discredited colleagues, because it is a place unworthy of him, ultimately too provincial for him to remain. Nor was Holmes the last writer to present physical force as an acceptable means of school government, though corporal punishment increasingly fell out of favor, at least among reformers. As late as 1881, a story in the Youth’s Companion, “Turning a Teacher Out of School,” defended this method as means of preventing school violence. The brief story focuses on the experiences of a teacher of a school in Cape Cod, attended not only by young children but also by many men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. The school gains a reputation for violence, and as a result the trustee tries an experiment, hiring an acquaintance “weighing about two hundred and twentyfive pounds, with the physique and muscle of a giant.” The new teacher has a “reserve force of will and energy that made him a dangerous antagonist when aroused.” At first, the students are duly impressed by his imposing stature, but as the first day wears on, they begin to break the rules, creating an “outburst of disorder that could not remained unnoticed by the master.” Providing no warning, the master seizes an axe from a pile of kindling and hurls it “with his full strength” between two rows of boys with “force enough to almost drive it through the building.” Rather than regarding this choice as unnecessarily dangerous, the narrator presents it as effective. This act was “an argument in favor of quietness and good order that the boys could perfectly comprehend.”18 In their terror, the students become utterly silent and they give the teacher no trouble for the rest of the term. With a pessimism characteristic of other late school stories, the narrator concludes: “It is not pleasant to think that scholars sometimes can only be controlled by fear of brute force, but if moral suasion won’t do, then that should be used which only such natures can feel and understand.”19 This conclusion places limits on the schoolmaster’s extreme actions—such measures should only be taken when necessary—but it also presents them as fully justified. Fear, it seems, is a powerful motivator, and students must be taught to respect authority by any means necessary. The story itself works as one such means. Appearing in the Youth’s Companion, it is directed to child readers, presumably to strike fear into their hearts in hopes that the threat of violent action, rather than violence itself, will prove enough to control their behavior. The narrator draws a contrast between the master’s use of force and moral

Combatants and Collaborators • 65 suasion, the method of school government reformers favored. While appeals to reason and students’ better feelings would be an ideal method of government, the narrator admits, teachers must deal with young people as they find them, and many simply are not open to persuasion. Those unfit to govern themselves must be governed by others, the story teaches, a lesson with implications far beyond the classroom.

Turning Force into Friendship: Governing By Affection Government by affection, though seen as ineffective in “Turning Out the Teacher,” was the substitute reformers recommended to school government by force. Rather than coercing students to behave through the use of physical violence, moral suasion coaxed students to do so out of affection for their teacher and fear of losing that affection. As Richard Brodhead argues, moral suasion entailed an “extreme personalization of disciplinary authority,” a “strategic relocation of authority relations in the realm of emotion, and a conscious intensification of the emotional bond between the authority-figure and its charge.”20 Moral suasion was associated with female teachers, who were significantly less likely than their male counterparts to beat students, partly because of norms of femininity and partly because their older students were often larger and stronger than they.21 In common school narratives moral suasion is presented as a means of recalling students to shared values, values threatened when students face off with violent teachers. The use of moral suasion reflects a very different vision of citizenship than corporal punishment does, privileging interpersonal ties as a reason to submit to authority. “Our School Teachers” (1849), a reform-oriented story published anonymously in Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, provides a strong example of the political implications of school violence. The story opens with a husband and wife discussing recent insurrections at the local district school. He is glad the master “has not conquered” because “boys in free America must larn to hate tyrants,” but his wife chastises him, distinguishing between tyranny and rightful authority and lamenting that, thanks to the violence and the community’s acceptance of it, both the boys and the men are “gettin’ to be awful critters.”22 In this scene, the husband and wife espouse gendered understandings of what it means to be an American citizen. The husband sees citizenship as the ability to overthrow unjust authority, while the wife imagines it as the ability to agree on a peaceful resolution and maintain useful institutions.

66 • Chapter 2 The story is complicated by the fact that each of the masters driven away by violence actually deserves his fate. All three are caricatures of the schoolmaster gone wrong. Because the narrative is explicitly reformist, the author takes no chances in terms of alerting the reader to the story’s villains. The first master, Mr. Violent, outdoes Israel Meadows in corporal punishment, the second is overzealous with his whip, and the third is a sadist who proclaims that he could whip his students to death “with unspeakable pleasure.”23 Violence is the only salient characteristic of each teacher’s personality, and the extremity of these portraits makes clear the narrative’s reform agenda. Those who take recourse to corporal punishment are portrayed as barely human. The narrative’s reform impulses are also apparent in the solution it proposes to this problem. After the boys drive away these three masters, the school trustee takes a new approach: he hires a woman. The townspeople are in awe, remarking, “you’ll never catch the boys fighting a woman,” which is precisely the point. As it is “plain enough, that the school cannot be managed properly by violent measures, and strong men,” the trustee urges his community to “dismiss this fighting principle” and see “what can be done by a gentle and accomplished woman.” His vision of the schoolmistress as kind and conciliatory accords with the idealized model for the woman teacher promoted by school reformers, the mother-teacher, the subject of chapter 4. And the trustee’s plan works perfectly. Miss Lewis reforms both the school and the community, bringing back the “old harmony and good nature” of the people, restoring them to the more peaceable state that preceded the arrival of the three violent schoolmasters. The narrator proclaims, “In more respects than one she was like an angel to us,” a ringing endorsement of this teacher’s ability to recall a community to its better nature.24 Rather than imposing foreign values on the community, Miss Lewis helps them to remember those they cherished before the invasion of sadistic schoolmasters. Where three masters fail, a schoolmistress succeeds brilliantly, because she inspires an alternative response from her male students: gallantry. This is precisely the solution to school violence Horace Mann suggests in his annual reports. While due to “false notions of honor and pride,” boys can be spurred to rebellion against a schoolmaster, their “generous sentiments” will be “touched with a feeling of chivalry” toward a schoolmistress, he contends.25 Much as Mann predicts, the idealized Miss Lewis arouses a very different response from her students than her predecessors did, thanks to her gender. Other fictional schoolmistresses, including the schoolmistress in Willie Ware’s “Marion Clyde:—Or,—What I Lost and Gained” (1861), experience

Combatants and Collaborators • 67 similar success restoring order to a previously violent school. But while reformers presented moral suasion as a natural outgrowth of womanliness, as we will see in chapter 4, these narratives imagine moral suasion as personally demanding, a deliberate strategy requiring significant emotional labor. The schoolmistress in Belle Rutledge’s “My Brother’s Wife” (1862), published in Godey’s Lady’s Book, provides a particularly strong example of the power of moral suasion. Rather than appearing on the scene in the wake of school violence, Miss Vernon is the rare female target of school violence. Refusing to be ruled by a “girl of a mistress,” John Sturgiss builds a barrier of rails across the schoolroom door, preventing her from leaving the building without exposing herself to injury. She confronts John to chastise him, but rather than indulging her anger, she confides that she is alone in the world and that she desperately needs to maintain her employment. She wisely appeals to both his reason and his emotions, pointing out that it “cannot possibly” do him any good to injure her, and expresses sympathy for his difficult home life. She is confident that his “heart is not wholly bad” and, like Miss Lewis in “Our School Teachers,” she knows she can bring out the latent goodness within his character. John finds this appeal very moving, starts sobbing, and resolves to do better.26 Just as few schoolgirls can resist the romantic appeal of the schoolmaster, as we will see in chapter 3, few schoolboys prove immune to an appeal from the schoolmistress, though sometimes it is tenacity, not sentiment, which wins them over. The schoolmistress in Live Saxon’s “Barred In” (1877), published in St. Nicholas, also finds herself trapped in the schoolroom by angry schoolboys. Rather than engaging them in violence or in conversation, she simply waits them out, and in the end, the boys proclaim that “she’s got the grit, even if she is little.”27 “Patty Dree, Schoolmarm” (1872), published in the Overland Monthly, likewise celebrates the schoolmistress’s grit and ability to restore order. When she arrives from San Francisco, schoolmistress Patty Dree is immediately warned about her students. A school committeeman, Mr. Whapsy, brings her a handful of switches, advising her to “put one o’ them in soak for Hazen Sims.” Patty refuses, and later learns that Whapsy, a former overseer from Georgia, has it out for Hazen. On the first day of school, Patty forestalls the students’ desire to rebel with a kindly sermon—moral suasion at its finest—but because they know Whapsy gave her switches, they remain suspicious. In true reformist fashion, the narrator laments Whapsy’s unfortunate choice: “How is it that men like Whapsy [. . .], ignorant of even rudimentary education, are intrusted with the oversight of teachers, and are considered competent to criticise their

68 • Chapter 2 methods, when they have not the first idea of elementary instruction?” The narrator’s complaint echoes a concern about the fitness of local school officials voiced frequently in exhibition narratives. And the effects of Whapsy’s actions are dire. Patty’s is an extreme example of a school that is a site of chaos, not control, a space where violence escalates quickly and easily. Whapsy comes to hear Hazen recite, rattan in hand. With a minor act of insubordination as an excuse, he flies at Hazen like an “enraged animal,” tossing aside his switch to beat him with both fists, while Patty’s skirts soak up the boy’s blood.28 Her cries are heard by a neighbor just in time to save Hazen’s life. Whapsy is run out of town, and once this violent antagonist disappears, the students are easily governed by moral suasion. Whapsy stands in for the kind of demagogue reformers feared would endanger the stability of the republic, and once he is expelled from the community, leaving the classroom in the hands of a capable woman, it can be governed peacefully.29 “Patty Dree, Schoolmarm” and its two-dimensional villain provide insight into the politics implicit in moral suasion and the vision of citizenship it privileges. Whapsy’s association with slavery immediately suggests to the reader that he is a violent monster. And the association of slavery with discipline by force in turn helps to explain the shift away from corporal punishment at mid-century. If it is wrong to beat a slave, this narrative implicitly asks, can it be right to beat a child, a citizen in the making? Hezekiah Butterworth’s “Experience of a Country School-Teacher” (1866), published in Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, makes this linkage more explicit. In the story, a schoolmistress takes on a school with a fearsome reputation, determined to establish her “government, which was absolutely monarchy” by laying down 144 classroom rules. A school board member offers her a political rationale to support her position: the Dred Scott case. She explains to her students that Judge Taney “announced the principle that negroes have no rights that white men are bound to respect,” a “principle equally true” in the case of students, who have “no legal rights, nor any discretion or judgment worthy of the consideration of their superiors.”30 The comparison of schoolchildren to slaves is scarcely one that Horace Mann, an abolitionist in addition to a school reformer, would have appreciated, particularly since this erring schoolmistress is a graduate of a normal school, the kind of teacher training institution Mann was instrumental in creating. Having tied the schoolmistress to the injustices of both monarchy and slavery, Butterworth then relates the way her rule unravels. The students intentionally injure her when she attempts to discipline them, then escape from

Combatants and Collaborators • 69 the schoolroom. She scarcely proves capable of holding them in slavish submission because, the story implies, teachers should not attempt such an experiment. The ending of the narrative makes clear its lesson for readers. The teacher’s successor explains, “He arouses the worst passions of his pupils who threatens a school,” but a “kind and considerate example on the part of the teacher is always met half way by his pupils.” She argues that it is the teacher’s duty to educate students so that their “sense of obligation to themselves, to their parents, to their future” becomes “so keen that they will govern themselves.”31 If the teacher respects students’ rights and teaches them responsibility, she explains, students can learn the art of self-government, whereas keeping students in subjection through the threat of violence only breeds trouble for both the teacher and the community.

Barring Out the Master: Violence as a Ritual of Consent Despite the many differences between government by force and government by affection, both models privilege the agency of the teacher in shaping what happens in school space. Whether the schoolmaster beats the students into submission or the schoolmistress gently reminds them of their gentler selves, rural Americans need convincing to accept the teacher’s authority, and school stories invested in these models of school government privilege the teacher’s perspective. Many narratives of school violence, however, are not focalized through the teacher. Instead, these narratives place emphasis on rural Americans’ understandings of the common school and their ability to define the role of schooling in their communities. Rather than highlighting the importance of the model of school government a teacher brings to a community, these narratives focus instead on the community’s prerogative to govern the teacher. In these narratives, teachers only succeed when they have learned to govern their schools by consent, to trust in the willingness of the students to acquiesce to their authority, provided that it is just and limited by community oversight. These stories recognize that school reformers intervened into existing educational institutions. Instead of saving the community or subduing it, teachers develop relationships of mutual patronage with those they serve and, as such, their power is continually renegotiated. The eponymous schoolmaster in C. W. Bardeen’s 1878 novel, Roderick Hume, makes the logic of this partnership explicit. Seeking his students’ consent to his authority, Roderick explains, “I want you all to look upon me as put here to help you in your effort to make the most of yourselves. This is not my school, but our school.”32

70 • Chapter 2 In few stories, however, is partnership achieved with such ease because few teachers bring Roderick’s openness to the classroom. Instead, rural Americans must continually teach teachers their place, and they do so through a ritual of school violence: the barring out. In each of the narratives discussed above, violence against the teacher is relatively unorganized, the act of an individual or small group, usually motivated by personal concerns, whether it be the teacher’s unfair use of corporal punishment or previous experiences of abuse. The barring out, on the other hand, is a highly stylized event. Students fortify the schoolhouse to keep the teacher from entering, defending their fortress with violence and demanding holidays, sweets (occasionally liquor), or both as ransom for the teacher’s domain. This action highlights that the schoolroom isn’t really the teacher’s domain: it is owned by the community members, and he enters it only at their pleasure. Because the barring out was an event that occurred repeatedly, it does not read as a singular action taken against a single individual, but rather as a symbolic event, a negotiation of the role of community consent in the operation of the school. After the barring out, the teacher is either accepted, having earned the community’s approbation and goodwill, or rejected and dismissed from the community, which ultimately maintains its authority over the school. Characters continuously negotiate the role of the school in their lives and communities, and the barring out provides one way to do so. The barring out was organized and attended by schoolchildren and adults alike, a ritual of the school term akin to the exhibition. Often, it was a Christmas tradition, a scene “well nigh universal in frontier school life even up to 1890,” though it grew less common as teaching feminized.33 But while authors frequently use the exhibition to demonstrate their superiority over the rural Americans of which they write, scenes of the barring out are usually told from the opposing perspective, inviting readers to root for rural schoolchildren in their battles against teacherly tyranny, real or imagined.34 Though the barring out is rooted in ritual, in common school narratives violence consistently threatens to overflow the bounds of the tradition. The event often represents a serious threat to the teacher, a reaction against not only personal abuses, but also against the authority vested in the teacher’s position. As such, narratives of the barring out prove a significant challenge to the thinking of reformers, celebrating community autonomy in school governance. In fact, Horace Mann’s reports openly lament the effects of the ritual. In his Fourth Annual Report (1840), Mann contends that the breaking up of schools through schoolboy insurrection is a “most serious evil, and one of not very

Combatants and Collaborators • 71 infrequent occurrence.” In 1837, for example, three hundred to four hundred public schools in Massachusetts alone were “brought to a violent termination.” The culprits, in Mann’s eyes, are clear: the “big boys.”35 This fills Mann with “immeasurable regret” because “at the very time” when adults begin to expect them to show a “self-regulating power,” “decorous and gentlemanly behavior,” and a “thoughtful and dignified anticipation of the great duties of life,” they squander the “last few running sands of their school-going life” and exhibit a “most baneful example” for younger students while committing the “crime of ingratitude toward parents, friends, and townsmen, who, at great expense, have placed within their reach the inestimable privileges of education.” The sins of rebellious schoolboys, in Mann’s view, are many, not the least of which is their challenge to some of the fundamental arguments for common schooling. Instead of becoming peaceable, virtuous republicans who recognize the value of formal education, these young men are violent ungrateful demagogues. As Mann sums it up, “As they are about to become members of the republic, whose boast it is that men are capable of selfgovernment, they are taking practical lessons in resistance to rightful authority; as though it were possible, that those should ever be fit to govern others, who, themselves, have never learned to obey.”36 The school should serve as a training ground for both self-government and acceptance of rightful authority, Mann implies, but he worries that it succeeds at neither, thanks to students who refuse to learn these lessons. As Mann’s rhetoric demonstrates, representations of school government by consent are deeply invested in the political questions behind schooling. Clearly, a model of school government that privileges the consent of the governed (and their parents and community) borrows from republican models, and at stake in these narratives is the meaning of citizenship. Most common school narratives do not participate in Mann’s condemnation of the ritual, with the exception of stories directed at children. An 1854 story in Forrester’s Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine, for example, tells of a barring out in England, incorrectly claiming that the practice “never was known” in the United States.37 Education journals share this desire to relocate the barring out elsewhere in place or time—a 1869 story featuring a barring out published in The New York Teacher is set in Ireland, while in 1858 an author in the American Journal of Education asserts that schoolboy insurrections could “hardly be said to exist at the present day.”38 While reformers saw the barring out as a prime example of the problems with rural schools, for fiction writers it proved to be a plot with widespread

72 • Chapter 2 and long term appeal. The barring out has a long history in the school story, initially appearing in English school fiction before American fiction. In fact, the short story generally recognized as the first school story in English is called “The Barring-Out” (1796).39 Much like narratives of school exhibitions, representations of the barring out share marked similarities. As Mann would have suspected, virtually all the scenes of violence in common school narratives are instigated by the “big boys,” young men as old as age twenty-one who still attend the district school. These boys act from a number of motives. Ill treatment, particularly the excessive use of corporal punishment, is a common reason for barring out the master, just as it frequently motivates other forms of school violence. Such is the case, for example, in Alexander Clark’s The Old Log Schoolhouse (1864). Although the townspeople are initially dazzled by the new master’s elegant manners, knowledge of foreign languages, and handsome dress, they turn on him when they realize how frequently he flogs the pupils, particularly Peter, a student who has always been treated with the utmost understanding because he has some form of learning disability. They learn that his classiness is only a veneer to disguise his violent and immoral tendencies, which leads the students to bar him out, with their parents’ support. Romantic entanglements provide another prime rationale for barring out the master, as is the case in Theron Brown’s The Red Shanty Boys (1884). The schoolmaster is in love with the school committeeman’s daughter, Hannah, and she is the only student who learns anything under his tutelage. While their parents vainly attempt to convince the committeeman to fire the teacher, the boys plan a barring out to avenge themselves and rid themselves of this undesirable teacher. Finally, the most common justification for the barring out is tradition. Why do students bar out the master? Because they have done so since time immemorial, many narratives claim, and the tradition should be maintained. While the ritual is clearly rooted in local events and traditions, representations of the barring out are also plugged into national concerns, as characters attempt to apply their understandings of what it means to be an American to their local circumstances. References to war abound in these stories, providing a crucial link between the narratives’ interest in violence and their investment in questions of citizenship. The language of national conflict is reshaped for local ends, as the American Revolution becomes not just the nation’s founding moment but also the impetus for young men in rural communities across the nation to beat up their teachers. As Carl Kaestle has pointed out, school reformers were especially fond of martial metaphors, which served to

Combatants and Collaborators • 73 aggrandize both their trials and their successes.40 When literary authors apply these metaphors, however, they frequently do so instead to aggrandize the mock-heroic efforts of schoolchildren dissatisfied with their teachers. Just as references to the Civil War work to endorse a caring model of pedagogy in “Patty Dree, Schoolmarm” and “Experience of a Country School-Teacher,” references to the American Revolution work to justify the actions of students overthrowing teacherly tyranny, even if such tyranny is more imagined than real. Linking schoolroom violence to national violence critiques teachers as a potential threat to the development of citizenship skills rather than, as reformers argued, instrumental to their development.41 In Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s “The Turnout” (1835), for example, national conflict is invoked to support local objectives. A visitor arrives in Georgia the night before a barring out is planned at the local school, and his host remarks that they must watch the contest in order to prevent injury because, while the master is always glad to be turned out and struggles only long enough to present a “fair apology” for granting the children a holiday, the boys “always conceive a holiday gained by a ‘turnout’ as the sole achievement of their valor” and “sometimes become too rough, provoke the master to wrath, and a very serious conflict ensues.”42 Longstreet highlights the role of the broader community in instigating school violence and makes clear how easily symbolic violence can slide into the real thing. When the master finally manages to break down the door and get inside the schoolroom, the boys knock him from his seat, causing several blows to his head, then pounce upon him while he thrashes, kicking them off. When some of the boys are hurt, their fathers rouse them to continued effort, calling them “young Washingtons,” which “cured their wounds and dried up their tears in an instant.”43 Rather than calling for peace in the name of the Founding Fathers, the students’ fathers highlight instead the violence that made the republic possible. Unlike the real barring-outs that Mann’s reports reference, “The Turnout” ends in a peaceful resolution that proves agreeable both to the master and his assailants, bringing master and community together on the same side. In light of the ritual, the master now has the consent of the governed to license his authority. With the aid of their fathers, the boys negotiate a three-day vacation and return home boasting of their valor. Both sides have gotten something they wanted: the boys have proven their bravery, the master has proven that he is not easily trampled upon, and both get the holidays they desired all along. While the father on whom the story centers originally distances himself from the boys, criticizing their excessive zeal for conflict, he later encourages them

74 • Chapter 2 to keep it up, then negotiates the “articles of peace.”44 Fathers and sons end up united against the master, who gets battered and bruised in the process, and they do so in the name of Washington, teaching the master that his authority in the schoolroom is ultimately subject to their consent, a proposition to which he assents. Were this not the case, no barring out would be necessary: the master could give holidays at will and the entire affair could be avoided. The story ends with Longstreet musing, much like the boys in the story, about the manly valor that used to characterize Americans, implicitly pleading for a return to the values that motivated the boys and their fathers, which he sees as in danger of being lost. Although English writers avoided the barring out as a “trope too dangerous to broach, as if fearing that readers would sympathize with the rebels,” here such sympathy is precisely the point.45 D. S. Richardson’s “Putting in the Summer Professionally” (1883), published in the Overland Monthly over forty years after the publication of “The Turnout,” ends similarly, with the renegotiation of the master’s authority. But while “The Turnout” presents this negotiation as a formal process, a compromise to which the schoolboys, their fathers, and the master explicitly agree, in “Putting in the Summer Professionally” the negotiation is more informal. Finding himself barred out of his dilapidated California schoolroom, the teacher-narrator is unsure about whether to regard the matter as a “serious breach of discipline” or whether he should “give the boys a tussle and let the thing go as a joke.”46 In essence, he cannot decide whether the barring out is an act of symbolic or real violence, a confusion many authors of common school narratives share. Though overpowered, he puts up a “very respectable resistance,” inflicting a number of scratches, bruises, and bloody noses to show he is serious. In the end, however, he treats the students’ actions as a joke. When he regains the schoolroom, he remarks that “we have had fun enough,” much to the surprise of the rebels. They shout, “Hooray for the teacher,” accepting and legitimating their master’s authority.47 Rather than proving himself to be highly invested in his own authority, the master treats his students with affectionate understanding, putting himself on their level and meeting their playfulness with playfulness of his own. The community does not need to change or to expel the outsider teacher: it simply needs to recognize the schoolmaster as one of its own, someone willing to embody its values and ideals. The story presents this kind of student-teacher relationship, based on affection and consent, as ideal, both personally and practically, as it allows the master to be highly effective in the school and the community. In this story, violence counterintuitively cements the bonds of affection

Combatants and Collaborators • 75 between teacher and student. According to historian E. Anthony Rotundo, nineteenth-century boys were frequently united by their opposition to adult authority, and the school served as a space in which the confrontation between “boy culture” and adult male authority took place.48 Richardson’s teacher-narrator turns this on its head, showing how a savvy teacher could use school violence to prove himself a member of “boy culture,” not an opposing force. The teacher’s remark that “we have had fun enough” classes him alongside the pupils as having enjoyed the rebellion. Rather than elevating his own example, the teacher-narrator holds up the schoolgirls, who helped him to regain control of the schoolroom, as true exemplars. “Boys,” the teacher remarks, “you have done nobly, but your sisters are better men than you are.”49 Rather than causing violence, the girls defend the master against it, and this, his comment implies, is a lesson that the boys—and readers—should learn if they want to be the “men” their sisters are. As in “Our School Teachers,” to offer an alternative to violence the narrative takes recourse to femininity, privileging the girls’ sympathy as an ideal, one the master himself espouses when he chooses not to punish the conquered students. That is, the master is both one of the boys—he enjoys the tussle as much as they do—and one of the girls—he demonstrates sympathy and affection toward the boys once they lose. Now that all are on the same side, the teacher’s job is an easy one. Having obtained his students’ consent, he has no further struggles in school government. Instead, he finds himself in tears on the last day, leaving students he has grown to love. The resolution of “Putting in the Summer Professionally” privileges the schoolboys’ perspective, but it also legitimates the master’s authority, as the students’ acquiescence to his authority is now consensual. This is not the only way for the story to end, however. In some narratives, the barring out serves as a useful means of denying consent to teachers unworthy of it. Clark’s The Old Log Schoolhouse presents this alternative. At Christmas, the boys request a barrel of apples from the master, at the penalty of being barred out, mainly because they want an excuse carry him out “in derision” and thus to jeopardize his employment. He refuses angrily, threatening the “most summary vengeance upon any who would dare to interfere with his decision or his dignity.” Despite his “threats and terrible efforts to dispel the young insurrectionists,” the master is “completely vanquished” and loses his control of the school as the students realize that their collective force can “strike terror to the heart of the tyrant master.”50 They have internalized the master’s lesson, that might makes right, but the text licenses this action because it is done

76 • Chapter 2 in pursuit of justice, to redress wrongs suffered by the helpless. The boys are permitted to take matters into their own hands so long as they do so with the approbation of the community and in pursuit of the right: since the master’s authority as unjust, it is permissible to overthrow it. The outsider schoolmaster having been dispelled, the former master, a local, can return the school to its former idyllic state, before the community decided to flirt with outsider ideals of knowledge and manners. The conclusion of Theron Brown’s The Red Shanty Boys is very similar. The boys contemplate barring out their master, who is wedded to corporal punishment and enamored of the school committeeman’s daughter, but she hears of and foils their plan. Only after the master beats a student with a shovel is he forced to face judgment. The student’s parents press charges, and the teacher is finally removed from the school. As in The Old Log Schoolhouse, a local man who used to keep school is reinstated, governing the school with the community’s consent. The community, the students, and the law all punish the master, showing the unpopularity and illegality of government by force and the ability of local government to redress issues of school government. Like The Old Log Schoolhouse, Brown’s novel presents violence as brought into a rural community by an outsider rather than as inherent in its way of life. In both novels, the teachers who spur school violence are well-educated and attractive young men, but, contrary to our expectations, it is they, not the older local men they replace, who employ corporal punishment and initiate violence. In each of these narratives, the community expels its young and attractive schoolmaster and is changed for the better by doing so. While the new masters bring violence, the reinstatement of the old masters allows for a return to a peaceful and idyllic past, only possible when the communities are left to themselves, unhindered by outsiders who offer flashy but ultimately negative examples to their children. In each of the narratives discussed above, the community’s perspective is privileged, as the master must gain the consent of the community or lose his job. The barring out dramatizes and celebrates the community’s power to check or license the master’s authority, responding negatively to the interventions of educated outsiders. Thus, the ritual rarely appears in reform-minded narratives, with one notable exception: Mrs. M. E. Robinson’s “The School in Perrin” (1854), introduced in chapter 1. Like other narratives of school violence, the story exposes the distance between the perspectives of the community and its outsider teacher, but unlike the others, this story privileges the teacher’s perspective. In one school year, the students manage to bar out .

Combatants and Collaborators • 77 and chase off four masters, but Mr. Kent proves different. Because he knows the students long for an excuse to rebel, he takes care not to give them one, instead letting the students follow their whims for an entire term, though they learn nothing. At the end of the term—at the school exhibition, but of course—Mr. Kent forces the parents to come to terms with the effects of their encouragement of their children’s bad behavior. Realizing that they and their children have made it impossible for any master to teach effectively, they give Mr. Kent power over their children, finally consenting to the teacher’s authority. The trustee explains to the astounded students: “All you have to do now is to obey. We have given this gentleman unlimited permission to do with you as he thinks best, while under his care, feeling assured that he will be no tyrant, or make demands which cannot be easily complied with.”51 The choice of phrasing here, particularly the language of tyranny, demonstrates that the story responds to other narratives in which this language is employed, like “The Turnout,” but in the opposite manner, presenting the master’s “unlimited” authority as not only just but also necessary for the school to operate. This narrative’s lesson for readers is very different from that of other narratives of barring out: the community isn’t threatened by the schoolmaster’s authority, but rather by the refusal to submit to it. The teacher’s authority is rightful, and he really does know best, a major difference from narratives like The Old Log Schoolhouse and The Red Shanty Boys. Collectively, these narratives demonstrate both the longevity and the utility of the barring out scene in fiction, allowing authors to weigh in on the limitations placed on the teacher’s authority and the importance of community consent for ensuring educational success. While the barring out is a ritual, it only occurs once per term: once a master fights his way back into the schoolroom, he has secured his domain and ensured the cooperation of the young people he serves and their parents. Even when the bruises are real, as they so often are, the violence is largely symbolic, a means of negotiating the teacher’s relationship to the community, a ritual of initiation for an outsider. In each of the narratives discussed above, the master and the community eventually achieve a truce, moving beyond violence and on to new models of school government. In some stories, such a truce is only possible when the teacher is replaced by a more competent peer; in others, either the community or the teacher learns a lesson that transforms their relationship from violent to peaceful. Thus, the violence in each of these stories is ultimately contained, presented as a step toward a mutually supportive relationship between the teacher and the community.

78 • Chapter 2

Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871) However, not all narratives of school violence end so tidily. What starts out as a ritual of contestation can easily become an actual contest, threatening not just the teacher’s livelihood but also his life. This is the plot of Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster, a bestselling novel and one of the only texts to feature all four of the plotlines that define the common school narrative. While other narratives of school violence are invested in promoting a particular model of school government, offering readers lessons on the virtues and drawbacks of governing by affection, force, or consent, Eggleston proves keenly aware of the limitations of these models, presenting them as temporary truces in an ongoing undeclared war between teacher and community rather than as permanent solutions to school violence. When viewed alongside The Hoosier Schoolmaster, even narratives that clearly value the perspectives of rural Americans read like advertisements for common schooling because, in these texts, the tensions between teacher and community are eventually resolved so schools can play a valuable social role. The early pages of The Hoosier Schoolmaster follow this pattern, but in the end Eggleston takes a far bleaker view. In contrast to the surprising optimism that characterizes most representations of school violence, Eggleston’s novel highlights the relationship between mundane violence like the barring out and a much more serious attack on the master—attempted murder. By doing so, he teaches his readers not about navigating community politics, but rather about the limits of schooling itself. As a Methodist minister, a reform-minded journalist, and an early supporter of the kindergarten, Eggleston seems like an unlikely candidate to offer such a bleak message. By the time he wrote The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Eggleston was no stranger to writing for reform. Between 1867 and 1870 (the years immediately preceding the publication of The Hoosier Schoolmaster), he “visited many jails and poor-houses with philanthropic purpose,” publishing his findings in The Chicago Tribune.52 Eggleston was also no stranger to education reform, having established one of the country’s first kindergartens in his home,53 or to literature’s use as an agent of reform—he addresses an imagined antagonist in his reading audience as “my Gradgrind friend,” a reference to Dickens’s Hard Times.54 As discussed in the introduction, Eggleston was a great champion of school fiction, declaring the story the “most effective of all literary forms in teaching truth, conveying interesting information and uplifting men’s minds and souls.”55 Surprisingly, however, Eggleston’s novel

Combatants and Collaborators • 79 exemplifies not the ease but rather the difficulty of schooling readers through fiction: rather than offering readers a unified lesson, the novel wavers between sunny idealism and fatalistic resignation. What Eggleston is striving for, however, is realism. In the novel’s preface, Eggleston announces his desire to “do something” toward describing life in the rural Midwest in order to be the first to dare to “speak of the West otherwise than as the unreal world to which Cooper’s lively imagination had given birth.”56 He was later to become a pioneering social historian, serving as president of the American Historical Association, and The Hoosier Schoolmaster reflects his historical impulses.57 Both contemporary reviewers and later critics have hailed Eggleston as a groundbreaking realist, a master of literary dialect, and the first to portray the Midwest convincingly in fiction.58 In keeping with this commitment to realism, the novel’s storyline was inspired by real life, by his brother’s experiences teaching in rural Indiana.59 Perhaps it is the desire to tell a story with a ring of truth that derails the novel’s early optimism: the novel opens with a sanguine vision of schooling that gradually becomes darker, as though Eggleston himself gained an education while writing it. Though readers, both in his time and our own, have agreed that Eggleston succeeds at presenting Hoosier life and schooling realistically, they have differed in their sense of Eggleston’s vision of the society he represents so effectively.60 Readings of The Hoosier Schoolmaster variously assess his depiction of Ralph Hartsook’s experiences as idealized and nostalgic or scornful and bitter. Bridging the gap between these perspectives, I argue that The Hoosier Schoolmaster offers readers both an idealized portrait of the school and a scornful one in quick succession. The novel is rife with inconsistencies: Eggleston sentimentalizes on one page and satirizes on the next. Eggleston’s difficulties in presenting a unified portrait of the common school reveal the extent to which popular understandings of schooling continued to evolve throughout the century. Even in 1871, when common school reform had enjoyed major successes, Eggleston continues to weigh the potentials and pitfalls of public education as though its purpose remains an open question. Instead of unhesitatingly accepting common schooling or actively resisting it, Eggleston struggles to understand it, considering and reconsidering throughout the novel what it might mean for a rural Indiana community to support a common school. The Hoosier Schoolmaster alternately paints a rosy picture of the promise of common schooling and raises serious questions about the limits of education.

80 • Chapter 2 Central to the plot, and to Eggleston’s vision of schooling, is school violence. From the first page of the novel, the narrator primes readers to expect the violence to come. Ralph arrives in Flat Creek from a neighboring village seeking a school and meets Jack Means, a school trustee, who immediately remarks upon seeing Ralph’s slender physique that the boys of Flat Creek will pitch him out of the schoolroom before Christmas because it takes “a right smart man” to boss the “big boys.” Eventually, although Flat Creekers are used to none of Ralph’s “saft sort,” Means decides to hire him because he’s got “spunk, maybe, and that goes for a heap sight more’n sinnoo with boys,” but he still feels the need to let Ralph know that “Flat Creek don’t pay no ‘nsurance.”61 This conversation reveals familiar threads in the representation of violence against teachers, the focus on Ralph’s masculinity as exemplified by his muscles and fortitude, as well as the assumption that the relation of master to community will be combative. Like many other authors who depict teacher examinations, discussed in chapter 1, Eggleston is critical of this trustee’s qualifications for and method of choosing a teacher. Eggleston’s portrait of Means seems like a parody of a backward farmer— but then Ralph agrees with him. He has lived “a bookish life” and comes to Flat Creek in order to learn the “art of managing people,” believing the community will offer “what he needed.”62 At first, Eggleston seems to critique the pugnacity and anti-intellectualism of Flat Creek, as exemplified by its school trustee, but Ralph’s acquiescence to Means’s terms and recognition of the value of Flat Creek’s rough-and-tumble ways is our first hint that the novel will seek to strike an uneasy balance between the worldviews of Jack Means and Ralph Hartsook. Ralph recognizes that he still has more to learn because some lessons are learned outside of books. While Richard Foster reads Ralph as the “bringer of light into the black swampy forest-land of Hoopole County,” this is only half true—Flat Creek has something to offer him as well.63 This conflict between Ralph and Jack Means is representative of the time period when the novel is set, the early 1850s. Free public education was first established statewide in Indiana in 1852 with the adoption of the township system. Wildly unpopular with farmers, they vigorously pushed for a return to community control of schooling.64 Educational leaders had reason to be concerned: in the late 1840s, only 37 percent of school-age Hoosiers actually attended, and the number of those unable to read and write increased at double the rate of population increase between 1840 and 1850.65 The conflict between the people of rural Indiana and educational leaders would continue well into the time when The Hoosier Schoolmaster was written, as reformers

Combatants and Collaborators • 81 continued to push for increased teacher training and county and state supervision.66 Rather than portraying Ralph as in need of greater training or supervision, however, Eggleston presents him as in need of cultural immersion: he must learn Flat Creek before the community schools him. Ralph starts to win over the people of Flat Creek outside of the schoolroom, when he agrees to go raccoon hunting with Jack Means’s sons, Bill and Bud, and shows valor in catching a treed animal. Instead of holding himself aloof from the people of Flat Creek, a paragon of virtue and learning that they can only hope to emulate, Ralph repeatedly emulates them, down to the Means’s bulldog, from which he draws an example of tenacious ferocity. Rather than worrying about whipping Bud, a twenty-one-year-old scholar whose muscles Ralph admires, he befriends him by acknowledging his physical superiority, admitting that Bud could whip him “in an inch of [his] life” and “never half try.” Like the schoolmaster in “Putting in the Summer Professionally,” Ralph tries to use friendship and affection as a means of school government, and, initially, he is quite successful. He “carrie[s] the whole school to his side” with his clever response to a schoolboy’s prank.67 When Bill leaves a puppy in his desk, instead of whipping him and thus giving the students cause for unrest, Ralph uses humor to diffuse the situation while making it clear that he knows who the perpetrator is, showing both his control of the classroom and his ability to relate to his students on their own level. Early in the novel, Ralph proves remarkably capable of insinuating himself in the community, winning over both of Means’s troublemaking sons, as well as little Shocky, a forlorn boy who thinks that God has forgotten him. He succeeds in some cases better than he would have wished, earning the love of Mirandy Means, the “richest, the ugliest, the silliest, the coarsest, and the most entirely contemptible girl in Flat Creek district.”68 While Ralph finds her attentions odious, earning the love of the girl who exemplifies Flat Creek’s values at their crudest shows how well he has succeeded in making himself valued by a community much disposed to hate him. One major exception to Ralph’s success building relationships with his students is Hank Banta. Hank rather creatively attempts violence against the master, pulling up a floorboard behind Ralph’s desk so that he will fall into the pond beneath the school. Thanks to some timely intelligence from Shocky, Ralph averts this and tricks Hank into falling in himself, giving the boy a taste of his own medicine, yet feigning not to know that he has done so, governing his classroom by responding to schoolboy pranks in kind. This action decisively wins over Bud, as the narrator describes it, “Muscle paid tribute

82 • Chapter 2 to brains that time”—but Hank’s enmity for Ralph only increases.69 Ralph’s ability to govern his classroom by acting like one of the boys is compromised when Hank refuses him admittance to this group. Hank represents the limits not only of Ralph’s ability to win over the community, but also of the extent to which education can change an individual’s essential nature. When Ralph craftily catches Bill Means in a prank, he earns Bill’s respect in much the way the schoolmaster in “Putting in the Summer Professionally” wins that of his students, by proving that he understands and can participate in “boy culture.” Hank, on the other hand, will not be won over—and Eggleston makes it clear that this is not Ralph’s fault. Hank is described as “low-browed, smirky, and crafty,” a “compound of deceit and resentment.”70 Bud and Bill are presented realistically, as individuals who change over time, but the novel’s descriptions of Hank mark him as a villain corrupt by nature whose inability to be transformed can scarcely be seen as Ralph’s fault. The inability to learn and evolve marks the novel’s other villain, Dr. Small, as well, and the inclusion of these characters is one sign that Eggleston’s faith in education and his teacher-hero is not in fact limitless. The barring-out scene, coming midway through the novel, presents both sides of this dynamic. It is instigated by Hank and Dr. Small, and it ends with all the characters but these villains admiring Ralph’s ability to beat the boys at their own game. In the days leading up to Christmas, Ralph begins to lose his popularity, and “the worst of it was that he could not divine from just what quarter the ill wind came, except that he felt sure of Small’s agency in it.”71 Dr. Small, like Ralph, hails from Lewisburg, a village not far from Flat Creek, and like Ralph, he comes to Flat Creek (ostensibly) for employment. Because of a resentment he feels toward Ralph that the novel never explains, Dr. Small uses his influence to spread a rumor that Ralph is a womanizer to cast suspicion for crimes that Dr. Small commits. A fellow outsider, he insinuates himself into the community of Flat Creek through flattery, companionship, and professional service—just as Ralph does. Here again, Eggleston falters in his representation of the work an educated outsider can do in a community like Flat Creek. While Ralph works for positive aims, Dr. Small uses his similar advantages to spread dissension, violence, and crime. To further complicate matters, Dr. Small is Ralph’s former schoolmate. Despite the fact that the two were educated together, one is a hero and one is a villain, scarcely a ringing endorsement for the power of schooling. While the novel celebrates Ralph’s efforts to improve Flat Creek, by presenting readers with a villain who uses the hero’s methods to opposite ends, Eggleston demonstrates the limits

Combatants and Collaborators • 83 of the use of outsider knowledge for improving rural communities. Governing through friendship and affection may work for Ralph at first, but such influence is not restricted to the classroom, and what serves as an effective means of control for a teacher may also work for individuals with less positive goals in mind. Though he is one of the instigators, in the barring out scene itself Dr. Small simply watches. Hank leads the insurrection and, on top of his other flaws, proves to be a coward. Others in the community are in on the plan: as in “The Turnout,” some of the parents come by, “accidentally of course,” to “see the fun,” hoping Bud will thrash the master.72 Ralph proves too smart to offer him the opportunity. When he finds himself barred out, instead of trying to beat down the door, to answer force with force, he climbs onto the roof with a packet of gunpowder, which he tosses down the chimney into the stove. The resulting explosion drives the boys out of the schoolhouse and they know they have been beaten. The use of gunpowder in the stove recurs in common school stories as a favored way to singe off the teacher’s eyebrows or cause other bodily harm, but here Ralph turns a schoolboy trick against the schoolboys, paradoxically proving himself their superior by showing himself to be their equal. As in other narratives, the barring out causes a shift in the master’s strategy of school government. When governing by friendship and affection fails, Ralph attempts to govern his students by consent, to use his victory as a means of winning the students and their parents over to his perspective and values. Rather than whipping the boys, he thanks them for arriving promptly and offers them the holiday, making them feel foolish for not simply asking for it. Had they done so, he explains, he would have readily granted it, exemplifying his willingness to make school decisions collectively. Ralph also takes the opportunity to teach a lesson in gender, remarking that the holiday would have been granted yesterday had they asked him “like gentlemen.”73 Ralph’s remark highlights the gendered nature of government by consent: he addresses his male students, although some of his female students are also present, and attempts to model an alternative version of masculinity, one that doesn’t privilege brute force. Eggleston takes this opportunity to reinforce Ralph’s superiority at just the moment when his efficacy as a teacher starts to be called into question. In The First of the Hoosiers, Eggleston’s brother later pointed out that Eggleston changed the way real barring-outs usually ended. Customarily, he explains, the scholars risk a “very painful punishment upon the chance of getting only

84 • Chapter 2 some apples,” while nothing particularly negative happens to the master who fails to secure a victory.74 If George Eggleston’s commentary is to be trusted, the difference he suggests between his brother’s representation of the barring out and reality is one mirrored in a great deal of school fiction, in which school violence always has significant consequences. Perhaps because symbolism works rather more clearly in literature than in life, the implications of the barring out are more significant when the scene is fictionalized. Eggleston masterfully renders the importance of the scene from the teacher’s perspective: the boys have the community’s support for their actions, while Ralph risks losing the little authority remaining to him and with it his ability to retain his position. And Ralph conquers, a rare ending for such scenes, one that reinforces his exemplarity as a teacher to readers even as the Flat Creekers begin to doubt it. Rather than answering force with force, Ralph uses his smarts to beat his students at their own game, asking them to consent to his authority. Unlike the students in other common school narratives, however, they elect not to, despite his victory. This is the last scene in which Ralph seeks influence by acting like the Flat Creekers. After winning the battle, Ralph does not rejoice. Instead, he has a conversation with Shocky, who has been left desolate by his father’s death, his mother’s imprisonment in the poorhouse, and his sister’s indenture. Shocky comes to Ralph for reassurance that God hasn’t forgotten him, but Ralph can only offer him platitudes, his own faith shaken by his inability to maintain control of his classroom through affection or consent, as neither is valued by the people of Flat Creek. “In the next hour Ralph fought the old battle of Armageddon,” the “same old struggle between Doubt and Faith.” Thus far in the novel, the struggle between doubt and faith has been about education, but here Eggleston retreats to what, for a former Methodist circuit rider, is surer ground, stepping back from contemporary social issues to philosophical questions. In the next scene, Bud confronts Ralph about a misunderstanding over a woman, and instead of fighting him, Ralph converts him, inviting him to join the “Church of Best Licks” as the surest way to “git out of this lowlived, Flat Crick way of livin’.”75 Earlier in the novel, it seemed as if education was the surest way to do so, but here Ralph’s battle for mastery in the schoolroom is replaced with a battle that seems to matter more to Eggleston. Ralph succeeds in accomplishing one of goals frequently articulated by school reformers by spreading a kind of pan-Protestant morality, but he can only do so once his position as schoolmaster has been severely compromised. Having backed himself into a corner in his representation of schooling’s promise and

Combatants and Collaborators • 85 problems, Eggleston turns to faith in God, not schools. We never see Ralph in his schoolhouse again. But Bud’s aborted attempt to beat him up is not the last time we see Ralph’s students and the broader community attempt to inflict violence upon him. As an outsider under the surveillance of a hostile community, Ralph repeatedly finds himself in danger. Ralph’s discussion with Bud is interrupted by Shocky, who seeks the master’s assistance in protecting his adoptive father, Mr. Pearson, from being tarred and feathered. Small has managed to shift blame for a spate of recent robberies onto Ralph and Mr. Pearson, both of whom have an inkling who the real culprits are. Ralph helps Mr. Pearson to get out of town, but the “escape of one devoted victim did not mollify the feelings of the people toward the next one.” 76 The resentment of the community falls resoundingly on the master. Warned by Bud to run for his life to avoid being tarred and feathered or lynched, Ralph barely escapes the mob, led by Hank. Rather than attempting to answer force with force, Ralph turns to the government for assistance. He flees to a neighboring town, where he asks to be arrested and tried in order to clear his name, because he cannot count on the law enforcement officers of Flat Creek to restore law and order. The entire town having been given in to violence, Ralph has no choice but to leave. Not only school government, but also the actual government has failed in Flat Creek. The trial draws a large crowd: “all Flat Creek was on hand ready to testify to something.” And testify they do—Hank is a star witness, making up all manner of lies. Ralph is saved only when Bud intimidates a witness into confessing who the real criminals are, and the community completely changes its opinion, finally willing to accept the schoolmaster after nearly killing him. “Old Jack Means, who had always had a warm side for the master, now proposed three cheers for Mr. Hartsook, and they were given with a will by the people who would have hanged him an hour before.”77 The humor in this scene is most effectively described in the terms of a reviewer: “This is humor laughing to keep from bursting into tears.”78 Hindsight, it seems, is twenty-twenty, but the townspeople have scarcely learned the injustice of lynch law, as they attempt multiple times to lynch Dr. Small, their fallen idol, and are only stopped by Ralph’s timely intervention. Unlike in most common school narratives, violence against the master has taught the people of the community very little, and all it has shown the reader is that Ralph is a misunderstood martyr. The community’s fickleness becomes clear in this scene, which explains why government by affection and by consent prove ineffective:

86 • Chapter 2 each is only a temporary truce, requiring the cooperation of the community, and the only form of government this community understands is government by violence. Even when Ralph takes recourse to the law, the people of Flat Creek bring the conflict back into terms they understand, attempting to lynch Dr. Small. With this depressing portrait of a community unable to be changed, the novel abandons Flat Creek. Although Ralph becomes “everybody’s hero” and “Bud’s idol,” he leaves town two weeks later.79 Even though Ralph now has the support of the community, he does not want it because the Flat Creekers have proven incapable of learning. Instead of eschewing violence after their attempts on his life, they simply turn their violence on a new object. While community integration was presented as a positive for a teacher and a prime method of classroom management in the first half of the novel, both Ralph and the reader learn the dangers of being a slave to community approbation. The teacher starts out an outsider, and he remains one, not because he does not earn the community’s consent, but rather because he no longer wants it once fully aware of the violence and hypocrisy at the heart of Flat Creek. The novel vitiates the argument made by localists resisting the intervention of school reformers: the people of Flat Creek are scarcely in a position to assess the needs of their community and organize their educational establishments to inculcate their shared values. When they inadvertently manage to hire a good teacher, they collectively decide to try to kill him, scarcely an ideal vision of community unity. The portrait of Flat Creek at the end of the novel is so negative that book gave “serious offense” to some “cultured Indianians”—and even today Eggleston “has not been entirely forgiven” in the Hoosier state.80 Though residents of southern Indiana voted heavily against public education, though one in seven Hoosiers was illiterate (as compared to one in forty northeasterners), Eggleston received such flack for his cruel honesty that he would later try to backpedal, claiming that there was never a time of “indifference to education” in the state.81 But Eggleston doesn’t flay Flat Creek to celebrate the perspective of school reformers and trumpet the march of progress. Instead, he lays bare their assumptions and blind spots as well. Reformers claimed that checking the influence of “the mobs, the riots, the burnings, the lynchings perpetuated by the men of the present day” required widespread support for free public education, but in this story the mob comes after the master.82 Instead of an institution for maintaining social stability, in The Hoosier Schoolmaster we once again see the common school as a site out of control, a space of

Combatants and Collaborators • 87 unpredictability. Ralph is well-educated, open-minded, and morally upright—an ideal schoolmaster—yet he proves ineffectual at producing any sort of positive change in the community because the only model of school government, and any kind of government, the people of Flat Creek understand is government by force. No matter how talented he is as a teacher, Ralph cannot change human nature, the novel implies, and those like Dr. Small and Hank prove to be beyond the reach of education. Instead of reforming the community in his own image, as reformers imagined an effective teacher could, Ralph leaves Flat Creek much as he found it. Or rather, a little worse than he found it, as he takes Shocky and his sister and Bud with him when he goes. Ralph’s eventual removal signals Eggleston’s ultimate difficulty in imagining an educational future for Flat Creek. For a teacher to be effective, he must be in and of the community, but if the community needs changing, then the teacher mirroring its values and ways is a problem, not a solution. When the community does not deserve the teacher’s affection and cannot be trusted to consent, no option remains for effective school government. Ralph’s departure from Flat Creek signals a failure, but a failure not directly attributable to Ralph. If the story ended here, then the logic of Eggleston’s presentation of schooling would be easy to summarize: what starts out as an earnest discussion of the ways in which a schoolmaster can gain mastery over his students and thus work for positive change in a rural community becomes a denunciation of the insularity of rural life and a bitter commentary on those who prove incapable of learning, as both the author and his hero become disillusioned. But the novel doesn’t end here, as a cynical exposé of rural backwardness. While Amy Kaplan credits Eggleston with exposing the West as a site of “violence, economic oppression, and narrow provincialism,” Eggleston backtracks from this image in the final chapters.83 But neither is Flat Creek, as Bud T. Cochran asserts, a “small world in transition” in which people are struggling toward higher attainments, a place in which reform is ripe for success.84 At the end of the novel, reform is high on Eggleston’s agenda, but it’s not Flat Creek that is reformed. In a whirlwind of an ending, Eggleston’s inner reformer reasserts himself in ways incongruous with the growing pessimism of the latter half of the novel. The lessons Eggleston seeks to teach at the beginning and the end of the novel are incompatible with what happens in between. This inconsistency, Eggleston’s own struggle for mastery, is the result of his diverse aims for the text, as his commitment to realism vies against his didactic impulses, his

88 • Chapter 2 optimism abuts his satire. Eggleston’s remarks about the novel’s aftereffects highlight his split vision of the novel. He prides himself both on offering an unflinchingly accurate portrait that does not sugarcoat Indiana life and on the reforms his optimism inspired.85 In the final pages, didacticism and optimism win out, and the reader is expected to forget the violence at the core of the novel. Bud Means reforms the poorhouse and mental institution where Shocky’s mother was held, then becomes a sheriff. Little Shocky grows up to be a professor who crusades for poorhouse reform, spending his spare time “making outcasts feel that God has not forgot.”86 Ralph becomes the principal and his wife Hannah becomes a teacher at Lewisburg’s graded school. We are to have forgotten Flat Creek—and the fact that the vaunted schools of Lewisburg are those that educated Dr. Small—and should relish what the narrator calls a happy ending.87 Indeed, it is a happy ending, for Ralph, Hannah, Shocky, and Bud, but not for Flat Creek. Ironically, a novel that sets out to offer a picture of real life in a rural community winds up forsaking that community to focus instead on the triumphs of individuals who are elevated far above it. It is these characters who are presented as exemplars to readers, who are assumed to have forgotten the problems of Flat Creek. In later years, Eggleston himself offered a key insight into the inconsistencies in the novel. Reflecting back on his career, he remarked, “Two manner of men were in me, and for the greater part of my life there has been an enduring struggle between the lover of literary art and the religionist, the reformer, the philanthropist, the man with a mission.”88 We can see this to be true in the way schooling is dealt with in The Hoosier Schoolmaster: the aspiring realist novelist presents a dark vision of human educability and the ability of schools to effect lasting change, while the “man with a mission” tries, on the final pages, to recover his argument for school reform and his faith in the teacher. The turning point in the novel is school violence: after Ralph faces serious violence, Eggleston struggles to recover the optimism present early in the novel, and so this text schools readers equivocally, despite Eggleston’s best efforts and great faith in the educative power of fiction. The narrator’s repeated addresses to readers throughout the novel reflect a resigned hopefulness about teaching and learning. He knows that “explanations are always abominable to story readers” and distrusts his readers, fearing we will not want to learn, but he continually finds himself “under the necessity [. . .] of rising to explain.”89 Like Ralph in Flat Creek, Eggleston is afraid we won’t learn, but that won’t stop him from trying to teach us.

Combatants and Collaborators • 89

• Eggleston began work on The Hoosier Schoolmaster with a strong commitment to accurately depicting Hoosier life, for the benefit of readers in his time and, given his historical investments, for readers in our own. The novel, like other common school narratives, offers us a series of snapshots of common school life, a collection of moments revelatory of the way nineteenth-century Americans understood their schools. Much like the moment when a schoolboy spouts a Revolutionary address or a schoolgirl is crowned spelling bee champion, the barring out is an event rich in meaning, and the prolonged interest in telling and retelling this formulaic scene evidences prolonged interest in the questions it raises. The image of the schoolmaster outside the schoolhouse, desperately seeking entrance to a space in which he intends to assert his authority, but foiled by his students and their parents, who are themselves unsure whether they attack him seriously or in jest, encapsulates the stakes of the development of common schooling in rural communities, particularly as schools began to be governed by powers beyond the local. It offers an addendum to reformers’ familiar refrain, “The teacher is the school”: the teacher may be the school, but the schoolhouse is the community’s, and the community can grant or deny access to it, as reformers were to learn all too well. When he is barred outside the schoolroom, the schoolmaster’s status as an outsider is highlighted, but when he makes it inside, he’s entered the heart of the community. While this resolution seems simple, common school narratives show that it was not. Although barring-outs happen only once in each story, in reality, they occurred ritually, year after year. And so they appear ritually, in common school narratives, in reformers’ writings, in memoirs, and in news coverage.90 Over the course of the decades these narratives span, common school reform was largely accomplished and the educational landscape of rural communities fundamentally altered, but the question of what this meant, whether the schoolmaster would uphold the ways and values of the community or be a force for reform, bringing outsider knowledge and values into the community, remained worth considering. In short, the role of the schoolteacher remained amorphous, continually redefined by teachers and the communities they served. This ambiguity created the occasion for school violence. But in the eyes of literary authors, it wasn’t only feisty young men for whom the beleaguered

90 • Chapter 2 schoolmaster needed to be on the watch. Just as violent schoolboys could threaten the teacher’s authority, so too could seductive schoolgirls, determined to catch the master. If school was a place to prove one was a man, it was also a place to learn what it meant to be a woman. In school fiction, quite as frequently as young men run their teachers out of town, their female classmates lead them to the altar.

3

Teachers and Temptresses

While many a literary schoolmaster must tax his wits and his muscles to subdue his students, for some, other qualifications prove more useful. In school reformer C. W. Bardeen’s Roderick Hume (1878), for example, schoolmistress Eunice Bell writes an advertisement for her school that capitalizes on these qualifications, hoping to spark interest in the community. The next morning, Roderick, the school’s new principal, finds the following in the local paper: The scholars are eager their tasks to resume, For they find a kind teacher in new Mr. Hume. He is gentle and good, and we know he is wise, And the young ladies say he has pretty blue eyes. Of course they’ll improve just as fast as they can, When they have for a teacher so nice a young man.1 Roderick is embarrassed that one of his assistant teachers thought such puffery necessary, as he hopes the education he offers can stand on its merits, but, oddly enough, when chastising Eunice he does not comment on the contents of the poem. While it initially focuses on qualities that school reformers and students alike would value in a teacher, kindness and wisdom, it then shifts to Roderick’s attractiveness and its role as a motivator for female students. Eunice highlights the youth and appearance of the principal, assuming that access to such a man will be a selling point for young ladies and their parents. Instead of precluding attraction, as we might expect, the student-teacher relationship is presented as both breeding such attraction and benefited by it: the girls, after all, will “improve just as fast as they can.”

92 • Chapter 3 The poem’s description of the schoolgirl-schoolmaster relationship is not one imagined by Eunice (or Bardeen) alone. Although today the combination of schooling and sexuality is the stuff of scandal, in the nineteenth century this combination was a recipe for popular fiction. Over 70 of the 125 school stories in my archive feature romance plots. These pairings take a multitude of forms, from childhood flirtations between students to more serious romances between teachers; between teachers and superintendents, trustees, or principals; between teachers and locals; and, as Eunice’s poem intimates, between teachers and students. Student-teacher romances appear with great frequency throughout the century, from Ichabod Crane’s failed attempts to gain the hand and homestead of Katrina Van Tassel in the first school story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” into fiction from the 1890s. About half of student-teacher romantic relationships end happily, in marriage; the other half end poorly for either the teacher or student. The vast majority of student-teacher romances occur between schoolmasters and schoolgirls: Elsie Venner’s seemingly extraordinary request of her teacher in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1861 novel—“Love me!”—is one uttered, in words or in actions, by many of her literary sisters, and one with which their teachers often prove willing to comply.2 Nineteenth-century fiction is replete with stories of schoolgirls who learn to love, honor, and obey their masters inside the schoolroom and out. These narratives reflect the role of the school as a “double threshold, between the privacy of the home and public space, as well as between the categories of child and adult.”3 As they consider the transition from student to wife, such stories instruct readers on appropriate norms for courtship and debate the ends of education for women at a time when schooling for girls was expanding significantly. As we saw in chapter 1, narratives of school exhibitions consider what kind of education will be useful for and attainable to rural Americans. Narratives of school romance narrow this focus, considering how—or whether—schooling will prepare girls in particular for their futures. When these stories safely shepherd young women from the schoolroom to the altar, they reinforce the dominant reformist rationale for girls’ education, that schooling provided preparation for wife- and motherhood. When the stories end badly, however, they raise questions about whether schools succeed at this aim and about the proper expression of sexual desire.4 The common school movement, particularly the expansion of educational opportunities for girls, inflects the representation of student-teacher romances in common school narratives, but student-teacher romance is a

Teachers and Temptresses • 93 story with a long history. Perhaps because schools are “important sites for the production and regulation of sexual identities,” sites where children grow into adulthood, romance has long been a part of our school imagery.5 J. Brian Schwartz claims that the “tempted teacher” narrative can be “legitimately classified as an American myth,”6 but Jo Keroes traces a broader Western tradition, looking to the Bible, Socrates, Plato, Héloïse and Abelard, and Rousseau for representations of educational eroticism. Other scholars have studied more recent representations of student-teacher romance, including films, television shows, popular music, and news coverage of school sex scandals. The prevalence of such scandals has prompted a considerable number of scholars to theorize about the relationship between teaching and sex. These scholars fall into four camps: those who see student-teacher relationships as pedophilia, those who see such relationships as sexual harassment, those who believe that sexual energy can be successfully transferred from love of the teacher to love of the subject matter, and those who believe romantic attachments can be liberating for both students and teachers.7 None of these theories adequately describes the dynamics of student-teacher relationships in nineteenth-century fiction, however, which may account for the omission of these texts from discussions of school romance, which jump from Rousseau to the early twentieth century. In many ways, the nineteenth-century context differentiates common school romances from contemporary “hot for teacher” pop cultural texts and crisis-laden news coverage, as well as from earlier representations of educational eroticism. First and foremost, the focus of common school narratives is on marriage, not solely on sex. Differences that distinguish the teaching profession today from teaching in the nineteenth century also help to explain the dissimilarity between these texts. Contemporary news coverage often focuses on student-teacher romance as a breach of professional ethics, but in the nineteenth century teaching was not yet a profession. Schools were staffed by a young and transient pool of teachers, and fictions variously accept or reject the teacher’s right to pursue a student based on individual honor, not professional ethics. Because schooling was not yet associated with credentialing, teachers were yet to become gatekeepers to prestige and employment.8 Teachers were often quite young: the mean age of beginning teachers in rural schools in antebellum America was a mere fifteen; this rose only to twenty by 1910.9 During this time most teachers did not have special training, they boarded around the community and socialized under community surveillance, their positions were short-term, and their tenure was maintained only

94 • Chapter 3 at the community’s pleasure (as we saw in chapter 2). Therefore, there was less social distance between nineteenth-century teachers and their students than there is today. The concept of pedophilia, so familiar to us from press coverage of school sex scandals today, was also still evolving. The term was only coined in 1886, by sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and the public first awakened to its prevalence thanks to an exposé on child prostitution published in 1885. In light of this, Americans sought to raise the age of consent, which had been set as low as ten or twelve in most states for the majority of the century.10 The earliest news coverage evidencing a sense of the teacher’s potential to sexually abuse students dates to the 1870s and focuses on teachers seeking sex, not marriage, from their students, many of whom were quite young.11 In most common school narratives, on the other hand, the schoolgirls fall only a little below the average age of marriage, the early twenties.12 Furthermore, the marriage of young women to more experienced men is scarcely limited to school fiction: in other nineteenth-century fiction, young women routinely marry men who are older and more powerful than they are, men granted considerable power to instruct their wives, like John Humphreys in The Wide, Wide World and Professor Bhaer in Little Women. Just as the link between power over children and sexual abuse only became a subject of debate late in the century, so too is our understanding of schools as sites of sexual harassment anachronistic when applied to the nineteenth century. Heather Weaver’s study of twentieth-century films demonstrates that student-teacher romantic relationships continued to be imagined as positive and socially acceptable into the 1930s, while Sheila Cavanagh contends that it was not uncommon for male teachers to marry female students after graduation into the mid-twentieth century. Thus, while narratives of school romance may raise ethical concerns for today’s readers, I wish to bracket these concerns in order to understand what the nineteenth-century acceptance of school romance has to tell us about the changing educational and literary context of which these narratives form a part.

Education for Girls and Women: Expansion and Anxieties One of the defining elements of this context was the expansion of educational opportunities for women. Even before the Revolution, gradual steps toward coeducation had begun, and after the war advocates of women’s education argued that women’s responsibility for raising future citizens required they

Teachers and Temptresses • 95 be educated, an argument taken up by common school reformers later in the century. Coeducation became common practice in the early nineteenth century, resulting in a major increase in girls’ access to schooling. In 1790, men’s literacy rates were double women’s, but by mid-century, literacy rates were roughly equal. This change largely attributed to girls’ increased schooling, and one that only accelerated over time: by 1870 girls aged ten to fourteen had surpassed boys in both literacy and academic achievement.13 Thus, common school narratives always feature coeducational schools in which girls—often the very girls who fall for their teachers—are frequently the best scholars. In their study of coeducation, David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot found that justifications for and attacks on coeducation (and, by extension, on common schooling for girls) only began to appear after mid-century, when coeducation was already a fact of common school life. Anxieties about education for girls and women linger long into the common school era, and narratives of school romance bring these anxieties to the fore, to assuage or to exacerbate them. Debate centered on the relative abilities and learning styles of girls and boys, the subjects of study appropriate to each sex, the impact of mixing the sexes on school discipline, whether coeducation “promoted immoral sexual behavior,” and if schooling adequately prepared boys and girls for their “later destinies.” Educational leaders agreed that coeducation was a positive good and a practical necessity, so these questions became issues of public rather than expert debate.14 And when they did, concerns about gender trumped the exigencies of the public school system. Because these debates took place among the general public, fiction provides a particularly important venue for their articulation. Fictional representations of female education are shaped by two major arguments: attacks on fashionable education in the early nineteenth century, which are actually arguments in favor of substantial education for girls, and attacks on advanced education for women in the late nineteenth century, which voice anxieties about reproduction and sexuality. Both are concerns about wife- and motherhood that become concerns about education. Women of fashion are deplored because they are unfit wives and mothers, while highly educated women are concerning because learning may harm their ability to bear children. Early nineteenth-century debates about fashionable education raged in fiction about exclusive schools for women. For example, reform writer Timothy Shay Arthur’s Cecilia Howard, or the Young Lady Who Had Finished Her Education (1843) focuses on a young woman whose exclusive education has ill-prepared her for adult life. While she is “perfect in music, dancing and

96 • Chapter 3 drawing,” speaks “French and Italian as well as a Parisian, or a Florentine,” and has “been all through astronomy, geology, conchology, and flower painting” at the “best and most fashionable” boarding school in the country, she knows little of the basic subjects and nothing at all about cooking, cleaning, or caring for children.15 This catalog mirrors that decried by the author of “Learn Everything, But Know Nothing,” published in the Massachusetts Teacher in 1856, who laments that “fashionable seminaries for the education of the future wives and mothers of the republic” try, “with the most self-complacent absurdity,” to “instruct their pupils in everything,” which results in only shallow learning and a lack of practical knowledge.16 Having been taught to value fashion above all else, Cecilia marries a handsome man at an early age and shortly learns, once he loses his fortune, that her education is worthless. She eventually becomes a competent housewife, realizing that when she thought her education was finished, it had really just begun. The protagonist of Mary Davenant’s “Fanny’s Fine Education” (1846) is less fortunate: like Cecilia, Fanny receives a useless fashionable education and marries young, but her husband leaves her when she is about to give birth and she dies, “one of the many victims of a false and perverted system of education, which neither fitted her for the duties of life, nor prepared her for its awful termination.”17 The call for increased practical knowledge in each of these narratives implicitly works in favor of common schools, as these schools were intended to teach the sturdy branches and basic morality without encouraging snobbery. But, despite this contrast, these same concerns about female education are articulated in stories about common schools, as we will see. Though this critique of fashionable education creates a social role for humbler schooling, “ornamental” women arouse anxieties in common school narratives just as they do in narratives of exclusive education. Debates over female education later in the century likewise trickled down from the private school to the common school, but they did so in modified form. In addition to appearing in fiction, concerns about female education were also voiced in scientific literature, spurred by the 1873 publication of Dr. Edward H. Clarke’s Sex in Education. Offering a new twist on the concerns raised by critics of coeducation, Clarke declared that competing academically with boys would interfere with the development of girls’ reproductive organs, inhibiting them from fulfilling their most important function, motherhood.18 Like Sex in Education and other scientific texts, common school narratives are interested in the relationship between schooling and female sexuality, but they shift the focus from reproduction to sexual desire.

Teachers and Temptresses • 97 This shift exemplifies a broader difference between fictional and nonfictional writing about the common school: while doctors like Clarke focus on the big picture, the way mass education for girls could lead to mass infertility, authors of fiction focus more narrowly on the day-to-day lived experience of schooling. Rather than the continuation of the race and nation, literary authors are concerned about the ways sexual desire could impede or enhance schooling in rural communities. Perhaps because of this difference in focus, romance is rarely mentioned in nonfictional discussions of schooling. By making school romance visible, fiction thus significantly enriches our understanding of common school life. Nor do those few reform writers who do mention school romance oppose such relationships, as we might expect. Instead, some present school romances positively because they allow young people to develop useful skills for assessing partners. Writing in 1849, magazine editor Jane Grey Swisshelm, for example, argued that it is better for an intimacy to develop in school, where the lovers are likely to have gained a “just and rational knowledge of each other,” than in fashionable society.19 In the 1870s, school reformer (and later US Commissioner of Education) William Torrey Harris, echoed Swisshelm’s remarks: when boys and girls “meet on equal terms in academic work,” they learn to admire the opposite sex not for “mere external charms of person” but rather for the “spiritual graces and gifts which lie deep in the character.” Community surveillance ensures that any “tendency toward indecency” will be swiftly checked, while learning what qualities are valuable in a partner will be of lasting benefit.20 When writers do present school romance negatively, they focus on the difficulties such relationships pose to a teacher’s ability to keep order, rather than on ethical concerns. In Confessions of a School Master (1830), for example, school reformer William Alcott remarks that school romance can be problematic because courting a student is a sign of favoritism, which causes other students to lose confidence in their teacher.21 In the 1870s, Fanny Fern (an acute observer on issues of gender and schooling, as we will see in chapter 4) likewise noted the difficulties school romance posed to classroom control, lamenting the ease with which young flirts can compromise a male teacher’s dignity: “How can he box those little round ears? How can he disfigure those soft, white palms? How can he—sending all the other pupils home— trust himself, after school, alone with those bright eyes, to put them through a subduing tear process? Ten to one the ‘subduing’ is on the other side!”22 Although each of these authors weighs the benefits and costs of school romance

98 • Chapter 3 differently, each focuses on the practical, not moral or legal, implications of such relationships. The scarcity of such discussions, coupled with the frequent appearance of student-teacher romances in school fiction, suggests that these relationships were generally accepted, provided, as we shall see, both participants are worthy.

Successful School Romances: From Teacher to Lover to Husband Although student-teacher romances rarely appear in reform writing—one searches in vain for a reference in Mann’s otherwise exhaustive reports, for example—their portrayal in fiction taps into widespread concerns about female education. When these romances end happily, in marriage, they assuage anxieties, confirming that education makes young women ready for wifehood. Marriage to the schoolmaster is presented as a young girl’s fantasy and a just reward for hard work and virtue. Such marriages also figure as a socially acceptable form of class-climbing: unlike schoolboys’ attempts to rise in narratives of school exhibitions, a schoolgirl using the school to marry up proves nonthreatening, provided she is also in love. Because most schoolmasters teach school en route to the professions, a young woman who gets engaged to a country schoolmaster will often find herself married to a doctor, lawyer, or minister. For the schoolmaster to be a prize, he must also be a paragon: these romances thus serve as votes of confidence in the quality of American schoolteachers. More than just fantasies for schoolgirls, successful romances are also fantasies for schoolmen, whose fictional counterparts are pictured as handsome, desirable, learned, and worthy of the finest young women. By around the mid-1840s, successful school romances began to conform to a predictable pattern. The earliest examples, however, are more likely to be humorous than to fit this pattern, more closely resembling the unsuccessful romance in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” than later works. John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Schoolmaster” (1830), for example, envisions a situation quite similar to that which Fanny Fern describes. The schoolmaster, satirically presented, finds himself unable to discipline a naughty schoolgirl. Jeremiah Paul, a “short, round personage” with a “spiteful little grey eye,” finds himself pitted against a “great, good-natured handsome romp,” who attends school in order “to plague Master Jerry.”23 Instead of striking her hand, he asks for it in marriage. Neither the schoolmaster nor his love interest is presented positively, and the entire narrative is humorous. J. K. Paulding’s “The Yankee

Teachers and Temptresses • 99 Schoolmaster” (1845) works similarly. Because a “Dutch damsel can’t, for her heart, resist a Connecticut schoolmaster, with his rosy cheeks and store of scholarship,” Mr. Longfellow steals the attentions of his best student, the richest and prettiest girl in school, from her childhood sweetheart just weeks before their wedding.24 Her father, who knows “what pranks” these “Connecticut boys” play under the guise of teaching school, discourages the match, but Alida’s mother, half in love with the master herself, encourages him, not realizing he is at least partially motivated, much like Ichabod Crane, by the schoolgirl’s vast acreage.25 The two marry, inaugurating a feud between the Longfellows and the family of Alida’s jilted lover—scarcely an ideal ending, but one presented humorously, as is the whole story. This narrative, as well as Whittier’s, laugh at the schoolmaster’s pretensions and mock the schoolgirls who fall for them; it seems significant that both were published before the greatest victories of the common school movement. These early narratives in many ways resemble exhibition stories: readers get a laugh at the expense of simple schoolgirls and their scheming teachers. School romances published shortly after these look entirely different. Both the master and the schoolgirl emerge as paragons, not comic characters, and the narratives are presented with the utmost sincerity. In all of these narratives, published between the mid-1840s and the 1890s, the schoolgirl who becomes involved with her teacher is bright, beautiful, retiring, kind, and beloved in her community—in short, an ideal young woman. Richard Malcolm Johnston’s description of Lucy in “Old Friends and New” (1870) is representative: “A prettier or a sweeter girl could not have been found anywhere in middle Georgia. [. . .] Her skin was fair, and her cheeks, though not habitually rosy, indicated perfect health. Her mouth—oh, dear me!—I have not the time, nor at my age the talent, to describe minutely just such a girl as Lucy Parkinson. I can only repeat that I never saw a sweeter or prettier girl in all my life.”26 Johnston’s idealization of Lucy offers a taste of the descriptions that each narrative provides of its heroine, each of whom is the kind of flawless character that Nina Baym has identified as central to sentimental fiction.27 And the schoolmasters who win these young women are just as idealized: Lucy’s match, George Overton, for example, is described as “very handsome and thoroughly bred” as well as “an ardent and earnest teacher.”28 Much like their student-lovers, the schoolmasters in successful romances are bright, handsome, thoughtful, caring, dedicated, ambitious, and respected in the community—in short, ideal young men. Like the “conventional hero of woman’s fiction,” each schoolmaster is an “admirer and respecter of women

100 • Chapter 3 who likes the heroine as much or more than he lusts for her.”29 The likeness of these character types to the heroes and heroines of sentimental fiction gives an ample hint of their source and helps explain why romance was so widely employed in school fiction: both the plot and the characters are familiar from a highly successful genre. This borrowing from sentimental fiction provides a ready audience for school fiction and a prime vehicle for the dissemination of educational ideas to a broad and otherwise potentially unreached audience. It also accounts for the most unexpected aspect of these stories: they read more like Cinderella than Pygmalion. Schoolmasters do not educate raw schoolgirls into ideal wives; instead, they find ideal wives hidden among their schoolgirls. Oddly enough, given that these are narratives about schooling, they are not stories of learning or growth, because both characters are nearly flawless when they meet. To a certain extent, the student-teacher relationship appears to be incidental to the love story, but education is actually central to the narratives: it simply precedes the beginning of the story. The schoolgirl in each narrative is always bright and accomplished—she deserves the prize of the master because she has learned her lessons, both in academics and in gender, ohso-well. Her intelligence does not make her a temptress, as it does for many other female figures in the history of educational eroticism, but rather an intellectual partner, able to appreciate and participate in the master’s scholarly interests while deferring to him. These stories reward an education well completed rather than displaying one in progress. They thus provide an education for readers, highlighting the role of studiousness, solid accomplishments, and gender-appropriate behavior in helping young women achieve the true goal of their lives, worthy matches. By uniting paragons in marriage, these stories imply, schools have indeed fulfilled their goals. The best example of this dynamic is Anna MacDonald’s “Our District Schoolmaster” (1856), published in Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine. In this rare story depicted from the perspective of a student, the narrator details the romance between her friend, Agnes Foster, and schoolmaster Joseph Gray. As expected, Agnes is the “pet and delight of the whole school,” “sixteen, fresh and lovely as the roses of June,” an informal assistant to the teacher and training to be a teacher herself. Mr. Gray, in turn, is regarded as “a paragon of teachers” and the “most charming of men.” It was a “perfect delight to look at him,” the narrator gushes, with his “eyes, glorious with the light of enthusiasm and feeling” and a “mouth which for sweetness we thought could not be surpassed.” While all the schoolgirls crush on their teacher, as this

Teachers and Temptresses • 101 description makes clear, Agnes does not join in their gossip, refusing, like the paragon she is, to speak her desires aloud.30 Only crisis pushes these two perfect beings into each other’s arms. Agnes’s mother loses her money when a bank fails, leading Mr. Gray to reveal that he is actually independently wealthy and only posed as a teacher to “see if I could be loved and esteemed for myself alone.” Agnes is overjoyed by this turn of events, but feels herself unworthy, as a “simple country girl” who “know[s] nothing of the world.” While Agnes’s modesty is presented as becoming, so too is Mr. Gray’s dismissal of it: “To be loved for myself alone, is the proudest joy that could ever come to my heart.”31 In many ways, this story presents its readers with a courtship manual. Agnes is modest and does not eagerly express her desires, a sign of both their depth and their purity. She is in love, not lust, with her teacher. The same is true of Mr. Gray: until Agnes’s family is in trouble, he does not express his interest in her. As a result, their relationship develops in a desexualized manner, as they learn to appreciate each other’s virtues and intellect. Agnes makes a match in which she will be financially comfortable, but the marriage is grounded in romantic love, the idealized basis for marriage by mid-century, not in class considerations.32 Even so, the marriage, earned through her hard work and virtue, will significantly advance Agnes’s social standing. As this story shows, it is acceptable for a young woman to use her schooling as a means of social mobility, provided she does so via marriage. Because their priorities and their behaviors are perfect, Agnes and Mr. Gray are rewarded with that which each most desires, security for her family for Agnes, recognition of more than his wealth for Mr. Gray, and romantic love for both. The ending of “Our District Schoolmaster” exemplifies another defining aspect of successful school romances: neither the schoolmaster nor the schoolgirl schemes regarding their relationship. Instead, love happens to them because they deserve it. They share a meeting of hearts and minds, not a physical passion. In most narratives, the avowal of love must be nearly forced. Neither partner imposes feelings on the other, but the two come to a silent understanding that is eventually voiced, usually at the end of the school term, when the two characters would be separated should they not forge a permanent attachment. Here, we once again see how the school setting shapes the love narrative, providing a fixed moment when the expression of feelings becomes appropriate because it becomes necessary. Because the student-teacher relationship is “temporally and spatially limited,” the characters exchange this relationship for a new one.33 The student’s connection with her teacher

102 • Chapter 3 forms the foundation of a new family, as their relationship spills out of the school and into the home, two places, these stories demonstrate, that are never entirely separate. Crucially, the avowal of love comes at the end of the term—that is, once the student and teacher are openly lovers, they are no longer student and teacher. In “Old Friends and New,” Johnston makes this logic explicit: George realizes that the “very faculties which he had for engaging [Lucy’s] affections prompted him the more to feel as if he ought to abstain from any positive avowal until he should be ready to go away.”34 This careful consideration of when expressing feelings is appropriate, coupled with the distrust of passion that makes these characters cautious, reflects a conservative view of courtship, one into which readers are being inculcated. Distrust of passion diminished significantly throughout the nineteenth century but it is central to all successful school romances, even those published late in the period.35 Milton T. Adkins’s “My School at Pinhook” (1877), published in Godey’s Lady’s Book, provides a strong example of this distrust. Adkins carefully draws a contrast between infatuation, which grows quickly, and true love, which grows slowly. Writing in the 1870s, when the school romance was firmly established, Adkins gently mocks his audience’s expectation that a school story should include love. The teacher-narrator addresses the reader midway through the narrative: “But, gentle reader, aren’t you getting tired of these details? Don’t you wish I’d hurry on to the part where the love comes in? Bah! Can’t you read one story without the never-failing ingredient of love?” Despite this mockery, however, Adkins proves happy to oblige, including not one but two school romances in his five-page story. For “your sake,” the narrator continues, “I’ll admit that I did fall in love with the squire’s daughter,” Emma, before the term was one-quarter finished. This short time frame— only a few weeks—alerts the reader that this romance isn’t destined to last. On the last day of school, the narrator proposes to Emma, only to learn that she is already engaged to another of his students (schools being, after all, the only good place to find love). After he is refused, the narrator turns again to the reader: “Don’t blame me that this story does not turn out in the regular orthodox manner.”36 In fact, the story does conclude in the “regular orthodox manner,” as the schoolmaster finds love in the end. This delayed gratification is part of the author’s attempt to school readers on the proper manner of courtship. In contrast to the narrator’s feelings for Emma, which develop in a few short weeks,

Teachers and Temptresses • 103 his feelings for Nora, the student he actually marries, develop over a long period of time, the three years he spends teaching in Pinhook. During this time, he watches Nora “growing up into the fairest and sweetest little woman that ever the sun shone on,” his love growing “with her growth and strengthened with her strength.”37 The deliberate contrast drawn here between the narrator’s relationship with Emma and his relationship with Nora highlights the difference between a sudden passion and a lasting love: the story counsels caution, restraint, and waiting, much like “Our District Schoolmaster.” And the repeated addresses to readers prime them to receive this lesson, asking them to recognize the distinction between true love and infatuation in both literature and life. To emphasize their distrust of passion, in most successful romance narratives the schoolmaster and schoolgirl share a love for something other than one another, be it Latin (“Old Friends and New”), English (“The Yankee Schoolmaster”), math (Locke Amsden), geometry and composition (“Our District Schoolmaster”), or, most uniquely, Native Americans. In Hezekiah Butterworth’s The Log School-House on the Columbia (1890), schoolmaster Marlowe Mann falls for his student Gretchen when she echoes his passion for teaching Native Americans. When they arrive en masse at the schoolhouse after their chief dies, Mann (surely significantly named) turns to Gretchen: “You see our work in life. Do you understand? Will you accept it?” It’s fitting that Mann asks Gretchen if she understands, for it would be easy for the reader not to. This is a marriage proposal, not a job offer. Luckily, Gretchen “understood his heart” and agrees.38 While Butterworth’s novel is extreme in its downplaying of attraction and its “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” marriage proposal, many narratives similarly focus more on academic than on sexual chemistry. Johnston’s “Old Friends and New” again provides a case in point. “No other relation” besides teaching, the narrator asserts, is “so favorable” to the development of affection “between two young persons of opposite sexes.” Under Overton’s tutelage, Lucy embraces her studies with new avidity, but she “had always been fond” of them.39 In successful school romances, the schoolgirl’s work improves under her master’s teaching but is not initially inspired by it: she learns out of a love of knowledge, not out of a knowledge of love. The stories thus endorse a version of companionate marriage that includes intellectual reciprocity, a significant departure from their otherwise conservative vision of courtship. For most of the century the intellectual accomplishments of women were a

104 • Chapter 3 cause of uneasiness in intimate relationships; in these stories, however, such accomplishments are celebrated.40 Working to assuage anxieties about female education, these stories teach readers that smart girls can also be true women. This vision of intellectual companionship is one of many leveling gestures through which these stories attempt to diminish the student-teacher power differential. Often teaching is one of the passions the master and schoolgirl share. Before the schoolgirl becomes the master’s assistant for life, she frequently becomes his assistant in the schoolroom, elevated above her peers, sharing status with the teacher. As we have seen, this is true of both Agnes in “Our District Schoolmaster” and Gretchen in The Log School-House on the Columbia. Perhaps the best example of this dynamic is Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolboy (1883). When a bad schoolmaster is run out of town and a new one has yet to be hired, the students turn to Susan Lanham, the brightest girl in school, to continue their education. Backed by popular demand, Susan takes on the mock-title of “Professor of Mathematics and Natural Science in the Greenbank Independent and Miscellaneous Academy.”41 Each evening, Susan teaches her younger schoolmates, ceasing instruction only when she briefly goes away to school. She returns to town when a new master is hired—and within a year, the two are married. As this enumeration of the elements they share demonstrates, successful school romances are fantasies, reminiscent of other sentimental love stories of the time, as well as realistic portrayals of schooling, highlighting the monitorial roles of the best scholars and the transience of teachers, each of whom leaves teaching at the end of the story. In their union of exemplars, these stories work at the level of fantasy, but this fantasy has a clear educative function, allaying fears about female education while instructing readers on courtship norms—norms, these stories imply, that teachers should teach their students by example. Like most nineteenth-century discussions of female education, these stories manage to be both conservative (in their portrayal of courtship and of young women rewarded for their modesty) and forward-looking (as the schoolgirls are also rewarded for their intelligence and accomplishments). The image of the schoolgirl elevated to worthiness for marriage via schooling works to assuage fears that education would unfit girls for marriage and motherhood and to satisfy those who used the domestic argument merely as an excuse for new intellectual opportunities for girls. The idealized image of the schoolmaster also represents a reformist aspiration: picturing a paragon presiding over the schoolroom works to make teaching literally more

Teachers and Temptresses • 105 attractive. The stories thus also function as fantasies about teacher quality and the potential to maintain masculinity in the schoolroom even as the teaching force rapidly feminized.

Daniel Pierce Thompson’s Locke Amsden (1847) In the hands of a common school reformer, the school romance could become more than a manual for courtship and a pleasant picture of common school life. The plot of Daniel Pierce Thompson’s Locke Amsden unfolds much like that of other successful school romances, but with an added twist: the novel reads like a reformist manifesto. Himself a former teacher, Thompson served as the secretary of the State Education Society of Vermont the year before writing Locke Amsden, and the novel reflects his familiarity with and passion for common schooling.42 Thompson uses the allure of the school romance to draw readers into his detailed plan for school improvement, an agenda the novel proclaims proudly from the first page, as it is dedicated to the “friends of popular education and self-intellectual culture in the United States.” Thompson’s recourse to the romance plot and the tender way in which he celebrates the love a schoolmaster has for his student speaks volumes about school romance in the nineteenth century: it’s a story even a school reformer could love. Although today Locke Amsden reads as alternately amusing, heartwarming, pedantic, and fumbling, the novel was acclaimed in its own time. Prominent educators praised it, including Horace Mann, Harvard president Jared Sparks, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This praise reflects the acceptability of the school romance to those most strongly invested in schooling, and the novel was popular with the public as well, going through nine editions by 1892.43 The novel was reviewed favorably in both education and mainstream periodicals. Many reviewers focus on the novel’s reformative effects and the use of fiction to bring reform issues to the attention of novel readers. Central to the novel’s ability to school readers, reviewers agreed, is the love story.44 The reviewer for the Common School Journal can scarcely contain his excitement: “Verily, here is a new thing under the sun [. . .]. Here is a regular-built novel,—love story and all,—the hero of which is a country common school master.”45 This reviewer taps into what must be one of the reasons the school romance is so enduring in nineteenth-century fiction—it helps to turn a school story into a “regular-built novel.” By doing so, it turns the school novel

106 • Chapter 3 into a powerful vehicle for schooling readers, including many who would not typically read education reform tracts. The love story between schoolmaster Locke Amsden and his student Mary Maverick is central to the novel from the beginning, five years before the two assume the relation of teacher and student. When Mary’s father’s carriage breaks down outside the Amsdens’ farmhouse, this “accidental call” begins a new era in seventeen-year-old Locke’s life. Though Locke is a brilliant scholar, his father scorns his educational efforts, hoping to fit him for farming. In contrast, twelve-year-old Mary encourages Locke to continue his studies and become a teacher, commenting that if he does, “I will go to school to you, and become a great scholar too, if I can.”46 This remark, seemingly made in passing, becomes the guiding dream of Locke’s life: he becomes a teacher in large part because Mary wishes to be his student. Like Mr. Gray in “Our District Schoolmaster,” Locke decides to become a teacher in part in quest of love, though at this point the narrator does not define Locke’s tie to Mary with precision. To do so would be to break one of the cardinal rules of the successful school romance—that neither partner can scheme—and neither Locke nor Mary discovers the nature of their connection until the final pages, though readers can predict it from the start. Obscuring the nature of Locke’s attraction to Mary also makes his decision to use teaching as a preparation for love seem less gender-bending. Male teachers conventionally taught until they commenced their “real” careers, not while waiting for love: that’s the dominant plot for schoolmistresses, working to earn their trousseaus or to support themselves while anticipating marriage. Mary’s behavior, on the other hand, is utterly gender appropriate. Her encouragement of Locke’s academic achievement reflects her idealized blend of deference and influence. She decides Locke’s future course and asks him to shape hers, modestly adding “if I can” to her assertion that she will be a great scholar. Locke finds himself haunted by the “inspiriting words of the beautiful little being, who in angel shape, had thus appeared in his path to incite him onward” and resolves that he will be a scholar and a teacher: “then I will go where she lives, and she shall know I have worthily done her bidding.”47 Because Mary is a paragon and teaching is a noble calling, she inspires Locke to undertake it, using her womanly influence to lead him down an ideal path. The novel then details the end of Locke’s common schooling, his graduation from an academy, and the start of his college training. While a college student, Locke teaches in a rural community, where he befriends a noted

Teachers and Temptresses • 107 doctor. With Dr. Lincoln’s help he secures the common school in a larger town, Cartersville, which just happens to be the home of Mary Maverick, though Locke does not know it. In the five years that have elapsed, Mary’s father has gone to South America and mysteriously never returned, leaving Mary with her aunt and uncle, the Carters, for whom the town is named, and their three fashionable but empty-headed daughters. Instead of attending the common school, the girls attend a “select academy” headed by “Manlius O. W. Tilden, Professor of Elegant Literature,” where they learn “crowquill penmanship, drawing, sundry problems in geometry, French, fashionable pronunciation, and the whole round of what [Tilden] designated belles-letters accomplishments.”48 This catalog would have been recognizable to readers as akin to that of women’s boarding schools, continually excoriated throughout the period for turning out women of fashion without any solid sense. The school, its ridiculous curriculum, and its “professor” serve as foils to Locke and his common school. Thompson tries to use anxieties about female education to the advantage of common schooling by tying them firmly to the private school. He draws a contrast between these schools to assure readers that the common school can provide solid curriculum and reinforce gender-normative behaviors. That is, he raises anxieties to displace them and to assuage readers’ fears about the effects of schooling on young women. To do so, he reintroduces his readers to his female paragon, Mary, whom Dr. Lincoln invites to attend Locke’s school to set a good example for the rest of the community. Mary is different from her cousins in every way, from appearance to behavior, and while the Carters refuse to attend school with the “ragged urchins of the canaille,” Mary is “quite conscious of [her] deficiencies” and knows she would benefit from common school instruction.49 Thus, the love plot serves reformist ends: needing to reunite Mary and Locke, Thompson does so via the common school and is able to demonstrate that common schooling can benefit those of all classes, even those who have access to more exclusive schooling. When Locke arrives at his school, he unexpectedly finds there is a student “whose appearance instantly attracted his attention, and awakened in his bosom a lively and peculiar interest,” Mary, of course. As if it were not already clear that fate, not scheming, has brought the two back together, Locke endures an entire school day without figuring out who Mary is, considering the possibility that she is “the sprightly little daughter of the interesting stranger” who “had left such an impression on his mind, and given such a turn to his

108 • Chapter 3 destinies,” but ultimately unsure. In this state of perplexity, Locke never even asks her name. Most assuredly, the story insists, this schoolmaster is not pursuing his pupil. Given the possibility of reconnecting with the bright angel of his dreams, he dare not seize it. After Dr. Lincoln confirms her identity, Locke finally approaches her and feels “not a little gratified and flattered to find that all the little incidents connected with that brief visit were fresh in her recollection” and she “had even learned his subsequent history.” Making no inquiry into the source of his feelings, Locke finds his duties, “as arduous as they were, seemed light and pleasant in the bright presence in which they were continually performed.” Teaching her, “whose mind, as he soon found, was fully capable of appreciating his own,” becomes the joy of his life and makes him a wonderful teacher for all his scholars, the reverse of William Alcott’s fear that favoritism would impair the ability to teach. Mary prospers as Locke’s student, but she is bright and knowledgeable in her own right, like the other heroines of successful school romances. Though Mary is intelligent, she learned nearly nothing under Professor Tilden’s tutelage. Her transformation supports the refrain of reformers—the teacher is the school—and highlights the difference a good teacher makes.50 Not only do Locke and Mary not voice their feelings, neither even acknowledges their existence. On the last day of the term, they hesitate to say goodbye, though neither knows why. The passage is worth quoting at length: Why were these two, whose thoughts on science, literature, the sentiments, or other general topics, ever seemed to flow together, like two united streams from fountains of kindred purity and clearness, and whose tongues ever before grew eloquent in the converse which was sure to spring up between them, and which never wearied,— why were two like these dumb now? There are states of feeling, when the strong, deep-laid elements of the heart are stirred, which seem wholly to reject the utterance of language, sometimes because words must fail of an adequate expression, and sometimes because those feelings are so consciously sacred, that they involuntarily shrink from the conceived profanation of such a medium. Both these cases might have been combined at this parting between Locke Amsden and Mary Maverick. Be that as it may, the quivering lip and the agitated countenance of the one, and the quick-heaving bosom and the gushing eye of the other [. . .] constituted the only language that

Teachers and Temptresses • 109 told the sensations of their hearts. It had never spoken before; but it had spoken distinctly now, revealing to them, for the first time, their own and each other’s secret, and apprising them that the deep, unanalyzed, unacknowledged feeling, that had been sleeping and gathering strength in their attracted bosoms, had a name; and that its name was only to be found in the magic word, Love.51 This passage encapsulates the defining characteristics of the successful school romance in a single paragraph. Indeed, Thompson’s use of clinical language (“There are states of feeling”) alongside the language of sentimentalism makes clear that he intends it to be a textbook case offered for the edification of readers. Locke and Mary provide a case study of the way love should unfold. They are intellectual companions, attracted first and foremost to one another’s minds. Their feelings are deep and sacred, as yet unprofaned by their own words or by idle gossip. They wait until the end of the school term to reveal their feelings, never openly loving as student and teacher. When they do share their feelings, it happens unconsciously and these feelings can be read on their bodies, but through tears and quivering, not a passionate embrace. Love is magical and mysterious, something that happens to Locke and Mary, but only because each is intellectually and morally worthy. Both passion and reason support this romance, making it an ideal model for readers at a historical moment when romantic love had taken hold as the primary rationale for marriage.52 While Locke and Mary’s realization of their love happens suddenly, their feelings have developed over months and years, and neither takes sudden action. Sudden action characterizes the other school romance in the text, which is contrasted unfavorably with Locke and Mary’s. Thompson uses a romance between Professor Tilden and the eldest of the Carter girls to solidify his case that it is exclusive educations, not common schooling, which threaten young women’s futures. When Tilden flees town with Ann Lucretia, the secret of his past is revealed: he actually is a fourth-rate actor, not a qualified teacher. When Ann elopes with him, she takes his promises at face value, believing she will live “among the very elite of city society, surrounded by all the elegancies and refinements of city life,” but Tilden actually intends to use her to extort money from her father.53 She meets with disgrace and poverty because both she and her teacher are obsessed with fashion and because their romance is clandestine. The contrast between this plot and Locke and Mary’s

110 • Chapter 3 demonstrates that school romance was not approved of universally, but rather only under specific conditions. Ann’s story is surely intended as a lesson to young ladies, but it is also a lesson to parents, as the novel goes on to advise them to get to know the men teaching their children and to appoint qualified school trustees who will hire only worthy candidates, a concern exhibition stories raise as well, as we saw in chapter 1. The Carters began to lose their daughter the moment they entrusted her education to Tilden instead of Locke, the story implies. The solution the novel proposes to this problem, and to all social problems, great and small, is heightened public interest in improving common schooling. At the novel’s end, the Carters’ house burns down and they lose their fortune, while Locke saves Mary in the fire and her father returns to shower them with wealth. With their newfound fortune, the Amsdens, once united in “wedded felicity,” become “the dispensers of comfort and happiness to others individually, and of general usefulness to the society at large, of which, ere long, they were the acknowledged ornaments.” They build a new schoolhouse, “calculated alike for the convenience, comfort, and health of the pupil and teacher.” Though Locke has left teaching to become a congressman, he continues to oversee teacher selection, and he, Mary, and Dr. Lincoln have made a fashion of school visiting, enticing all members of the community to take interest and pride in their school. Neighboring villages have caught the school reform bug, “[o]rnamental education” is never again thought of, and the “whole tone of society has changed.” As the narrator informs us, “that change, kind reader, great and beneficial as it is, has been effected by the nobly begun, and subsequently, the no less nobly sustained efforts of the Common Schoolmaster.”54 In short, the common school, and the romance it nurtured, has turned Vermont into a utopia. Thompson offers a happy ending for novel readers, Locke and Mary’s marriage, and a happy ending for school reformers, complete social transformation. The two endings are mutually dependent: without his romantic attraction to Mary, Locke may not have become a teacher at all, and Locke and Mary’s marriage and the fortune they inherit allow them to become a force for reform on a broad scale. Thompson’s adoption of the romance plot for reformist ends demonstrates both the acceptability of student-teacher romance and his faith in fiction as a mode of education, capable of assuaging anxieties about schooling. And his depiction of both an unsuccessful and a successful school romance set a pattern replicated in fiction for decades to come.

Teachers and Temptresses • 111

Unsuccessful School Romances: From Teacher to Lover to Enemy Failed school romances tell us more about the characteristics of the participants—and those desired in schoolgirls and schoolmasters—than about discomfort with student-teacher romantic relationships in principle. In unsuccessful romances, either the schoolgirl or her teacher is blamed for the failure of their relationship. Those narratives that blame the teacher complement the celebration of paragon teachers in successful romances by mocking or condemning poor teachers. Like their counterparts, these stories ultimately provide a sanguine view of what schooling can accomplish, provided schools are competently staffed. Those stories that blame the schoolgirl, however, are more complicated, schooling readers on courtship norms while calling into question reformers’ assertion that schooling prepared girls for marriage and motherhood. These stories work to discipline the audience and, paradoxically, to eroticize the school experience despite their attempts to tamp down desire. Like successful school romances, these stories fall into a predictable pattern, in many ways the inverse of that followed by those ending in marriage. In contrast to the paragons that populate successful romances, in failed romances either the schoolgirl or her teacher is unworthy of true love: he is a bad teacher, he or she is lustful, she is manipulative, or he is arrogant. Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home—Who’ll Follow? (1839) provides an early and extreme example. In contrast to the handsome schoolmasters of successful romances, Cyrus Whicher is “shaped like a starved greyhound in the collapsed stage, his very eyes faded to the colour of the skim-milk.” When Hannah Parsons, a nineteen-year-old woman with a two-year-old son, decides to attend his school, he lacks the “courage or firmness to object to her reception.” From the moment Hannah starts attending his school, the “unfortunate Whicher was her victim.” She shows him “deferential attention,” constantly asks for help, and brings along small gifts, all of which torture the teacher, whose “life wore away under the anguish inflicted by his tormentor.” Soon, Hannah’s plan becomes clear: “it was whispered that Hannah Parsons would again bring to the eye of day a living evidence of her shame; and the unfortunate schoolmaster saw himself the victim of a conspiracy.” He flees town in poverty, joins a gang of desperadoes, and is eventually hanged. Whicher is an innocent fool; Hannah, a scheming temptress, and the combination, Kirkland demonstrates, can only lead to disaster.55

112 • Chapter 3 Most condemnations of the failings of schoolmasters and schoolgirls are less extreme than Kirkland’s. In Caroline Lee Hentz’s Ernest Linwood (1856), discussed in chapter 4, Mr. Regulus proves unworthy of his student Gabriella’s love because he discourages her from writing poetry. He later repents this cruelty, explaining that she has since schooled him in the “perception of the beautiful,” but the fact that he needs to be schooled at all makes him undeserving of her love.56 While Hentz focuses on a schoolmaster’s lack of appreciation for art, other narratives focus on too great an appreciation for fashion, a taste that education was frequently imputed to develop in young women. Alexander Clark’s The Old Log Schoolhouse (1864) tells the story of a “charming young stranger” who wows the school committeeman with his “elegant manners” and knowledge of “at least a dozen different languages.” The master quickly loses favor, however, because of his excessive use of corporal punishment and disappears “with a promise of marriage unfulfilled,” unfit to marry even a similarly arrogant schoolgirl.57 C. W. Bardeen’s Commissioner Hume (1879) makes a similar point: a “lazy, low-minded, bullying coward, always in debt, always quarrelling, without a title to respect,” Jeremiah Slack, seduces his student Polly, thanks to his showy appearance.58 Polly is saved just in time by the revelation that Slack forged his teaching license, learns her lesson, and marries a different schoolmaster. In both these examples, schoolgirls are drawn into the machinations of men of fashion, and both narrowly escape disastrous marriages. When the schoolmaster is motivated by a schoolgirl’s fortune, the romance is particularly likely to be condemned. This is one of the reasons Ichabod Crane’s pursuit of Katrina in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” proves unsuccessful: he spends the story dreaming of the “fat meadow-lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchards burthened with ruddy fruit” Katrina is to inherit.59 Jeremiah Slack is punished for pursuing Polly for her social position, and the same is true of Mr. Gordon, the teacher in The Old Log Schoolhouse, and Mr. Wiggin, the teacher in Theron Brown’s The Red Shanty Boys (1884). Each case raises class considerations as a motive for marriage, a travesty against romantic love that must be condemned. Scheming is problematic because it undermines what Ellen Rothman has identified as the “mortar” that held nineteenth-century relationships together, candor.60 Candid and unmaterialistic lovers often get precisely what Ichabod wants: Locke inherits Mary’s father’s fortune precisely because he did not seek to use love to advance his status. And if economic motives are suspect, sexual motives are still more so.

Teachers and Temptresses • 113 Physical chemistry is fatal to the school romance. From Ichabod Crane’s metaphorical appetite to Elsie Venner’s ability to attract her teacher using her eyes alone, sexual desire is always problematic in school stories, less due to an investment in childhood innocence than to the belief that sexual expression, “the ultimate symbol of love,” should be reserved for serious relationships.61 Bret Harte’s Cressy (1889) demonstrates this particularly well. Cressy’s clandestine rendezvous with her teacher, Jack Ford, continually place him in danger of violence because their relationship is merely a dalliance, largely comprised of repeated meetings in an abandoned barn. It takes Jack some time to realize his predicament: “In the reckless, thoughtless, extravagant—yet thus far innocent—indulgence of their mutual passion, he had never spoken of marriage, nor—and it struck him now with the same incongruous mingling of relief and uneasiness—had she!”62 Within the context of the school story, this is all but unthinkable, and Jack eventually does lip service to the idea that he intends to marry Cressy, but she recognizes the relationship for what it is. She explains to her teacher, “I don’t know enough to be a wife to you, just now, and you know it. [. . .] And then it would be all known, and it wouldn’t be us two, dear, our lonely meetings any more.”63 The “loneliness” of the meetings is what makes them attractive and what makes them unacceptable in the context of the school story, as they do not tend toward marriage, for which schooling has yet to fit Cressy. Jack faces a gang hoping to avenge Cressy’s honor and nearly pays the ultimate price, but it all works out in the end, and the story wavers between humor and moralizing, indulging the passion it decries. Though guilt is often laid on schoolmasters, it falls still more resoundingly on their students. One way these narratives attempt to make their lessons clear is by employing language of judgment in describing the schoolgirls. Repeatedly, they are referred to as flirts or coquettes, which works to condemn female desire and to get male teachers off the hook for desiring their students. School narratives echo the criticism, voiced in sentimental novels, of women who “lived for excitement” and admiration in the “mistaken belief that such self-gratification was equivalent to power and influence.”64 The temptress in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), Katrina Van Tassel, for example, is referred to as a coquette.65 The schoolgirls who vie for Bernard Langdon’s attention in Elsie Venner are characterized as “village belle[s],” and they are held responsible for their actions as Bernard, “one of the natural class of the sex-subduers,” is not.66 In the context of common school narratives, we could offer another name for this “natural class”: schoolmasters. These stories, even

114 • Chapter 3 while they decry coquettes, also contain a strong element of fantasy. The profession is so full of desirable men that schoolgirls can’t help but throw themselves at their teachers these stories imply, seeking to teach young women to manage the expression of their desires even while serving up dishy schoolmasters for the consumption of female readers. By the 1870s, the Youth’s Companion explicitly advised young women against scheming to marry their teachers: apparently, doing so had become common enough to warrant a direct admonition. “Catching the Schoolmaster” (1878) traces the reaction of a group of schoolgirls to the hiring of a new master. Since he is young, handsome, and “just as nice as can be,” Frances (called Frank, a telltale sign of her gender-inappropriate behavior) challenges her classmates: “let’s see who’ll catch him.” She is willing to “try anything” to win the competition because the master is studying law and she means to marry a lawyer. Frank’s efforts are in vain, though she can’t figure out why until the master’s secret is revealed: he is already married. Frank blusters away at her friend and the minister, both of whom have let her make a fool of herself. The story closes with a lecture from the minister: “When you are old enough and wise enough to have homes of your own, wait till some worthy man throws out the line and catches you. [ . . . A]lthough none of you have caught the schoolmaster, you ought to catch many a wise lesson from his manly, modest demeanor, as well as from his instruction.”67 While the story warns against trying to catch the schoolmaster, it never denies that he is a catch. The master is worthy of the girls’ admiration, but pursuing him is seen as inappropriate. The minister schools Frank and her friends—and the reader—on courtship norms, counseling modesty and reliance on male initiative. This conclusion reflects Harris’s and Swisshelm’s belief that schools play a role in students’ romantic futures by providing guidance on what a suitable partner should be like. He should be, this story implies, just like the teacher. In many narratives, schoolgirls’ inappropriate scheming extends to academics. Unlike the heroines of successful romances, these girls are not particularly bright and are only motivated by attraction to the schoolmaster. Often, the schoolgirl does not actually become a better scholar; she simply acts like a better scholar, occasionally cheating to get ahead, as Julia does in Mary Jane Holmes’s Tempest and Sunshine (1854). Many theories of educational eroticism have focused on the possibility of attraction to the teacher inspiring students to become better learners, but nineteenth-century fiction resolutely rejects this idea.68 Instead, the increased attentiveness to schoolwork is seen as superficial at best. In Elsie Venner, for example, the girls under Bernard

Teachers and Temptresses • 115 Langdon’s tutelage believe they are making “rapid progress in their studies,” but in truth they’re spending more time thinking about their teacher, not their homework.69 The girls in “Catching in the Schoolmaster” are likewise motivated to work harder, but they become discouraged when they cannot catch the master. Bret Harte’s Cressy works similarly: Cressy bestows “unusual care” on her schoolwork, but just until she seduces her teacher.70 In these stories, academic scheming is seen as harmful because it is insincere. The students are only pretending to love their studies for love of their teacher, which is both immoral and a poor basis for continuing academic achievement. In addition to blaming seductive schoolgirls, some romances spread the blame more widely, to include the schoolgirl’s mother. Blaming mothers creates an increased role for schooling—correcting home teaching—and shifts some of the onus for producing inappropriately desirous young women back onto the home. In Elsie Venner, Ernest Linwood, and “The Two Suitors,” Elsie, Gabriella, and Almira’s mothers are dead and thus unable to provide necessary guidance. But the most serious condemnation is reserved for living but inadequate mothers. In A New Home—Who’ll Follow?, it is Hannah’s mother who makes the excuses needed to get her into the school where she frames the master for fathering her child. Polly Granger’s attraction to her teacher in Commissioner Hume is blamed nearly entirely on her mother: “The child is unhappy who cannot respect its mother, and such a child was Polly.”71 When seeking to excuse her behavior, Polly echoes the blame the narrator places on her mother, claiming that to “deserve the love due to a mother, she must be a mother” and lamenting that unlike other girls, she has “no home, no mother, no friend.”72 Who rises to play this role and correct her path? A schoolmaster, of course. Bret Harte similarly excuses Cressy’s pursuit of her teacher by pointing the finger at her mother, a “fair type of a class not uncommon on the Southwestern frontier; women who were ruder helpmeets of their rude husbands and brothers, who had shared their privations and sufferings with surly, masculine endurance, rather than with feminine patience.” Of course Cressy has “developed strangely under this sexless relationship”: what choice did Cressy have but to literally go for a roll in the hay with her schoolmaster?73 These stories raise doubts about the educations girls receive, which appear to be doubts about schooling, then displace them back onto the home, leaving readers with a sense of the ungovernability of girls if nothing else. Instead of as a space in which schoolmasters reign supreme by properly controlling their students, these narratives imagine the school as a place in which imposters could abuse their power over students’ affections as well as

116 • Chapter 3 their bodies, a place where schoolgirls could exercise their unmaidenly wiles. As in narratives of school violence, events and relationships in the schoolhouse quickly spiral out of control and spill beyond the boundaries of the school. In fact, some school romances are barely tied to the school at all, as is the case in O. A. Bierstadt’s “The Two Suitors” (1882). In this remarkably strange narrative, Bierstadt tells the story of a schoolmistress who is visited every year for a decade on her birthday by her former teacher, who annually renews his suit, many times rejected. Mr. Theophilus is a doddering fool— twice the age of his now thirty-year-old former pupil, comical in appearance, and plagued with a “love of polysyllables”—so it seems fortunate that Almira’s respect for her teacher “has never melted into the love due to a husband.”74 That is, until Almira falls for an attractive and mysterious stranger, who tries to kill her and steals her savings. Suddenly, Mr. Theophilus, for all his failings, doesn’t look so bad. What is the lesson here? Marry the sincere but doddering schoolmaster when you have the chance? “The Two Suitors” provides a prime example of the unresolvability of many unsuccessful romances: while they seek to point the finger of blame, they are far less easily reduced to “lessons” than are successful romances. Collectively, unsuccessful school romances raise fears about the roles of the schoolgirl and the schoolmaster inside the classroom and out. They condemn expressions of female desire even as they dwell on the qualities that make teachers desirable. They blame mothers for schoolgirls’ inappropriate behavior even as they show that these girls are the products of years of schooling. They also diverge from reformers’ image of the idealized teacher to present schoolmasters easily led into temptation, lusting for students’ bodies or fortunes. When these narratives are considered alongside successful school romances, at first glance they seem to fit a common pattern for nineteenth-century fiction about women, ending in marriage or death. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis explains, marriage serves as a reward for heroines, a celebration of a “successful integration with society, in which the gain is both financial and romantic success,” while death is a punishment, a judgment for social failure.75 However, while marriage does function as a reward in school romances, punishment is meted out with less frequency than we might expect. Elsie Venner dies, and Almira in “The Two Suitors” nearly does, but Cressy, Polly in Commissioner Hume, Katrina in “Sleepy Hollow,” and Gabriella in Ernest Linwood simply marry men who aren’t their teachers. Consequences for teachers are not quite as severe as we might imagine either: Cyrus Whicher in A New Home suffers greatly, but most of his peers do not. The

Teachers and Temptresses • 117 romances in these narratives are presented as undesirable or dangerous—the stories are rife with moralizing—but many of the romances appear to be peculiarly victimless crimes. To be sure, this is because in some of these narratives, true to their educational purposes, the lovers learn their lessons. But in the others, distance remains between condemnation and consequences. Although the successful school romances present unified lessons, unsuccessful school romances preach and undercut their morals on the same page. When the schoolmaster and schoolgirl aren’t perfect, their love stories are messier, and often they read more equivocally than the moralizing within the texts seems to allow. As the foregoing discussion makes clear, these narratives are shaped by the conventions of the sentimental novel, as well as by concerns about schooling for girls and women. Sometimes, sentimental conventions serve authors’ ideological ends, particularly in successful romances, but in failed romances the demands of sentimentalism can complement or compete with the text’s investment in educational issues. This interplay between generic demands and educational aims makes unsuccessful school romances an especially rich archive for considering the ways literary form advances or inhibits authors’ attempts to teach. In order to do so, I consider two unsuccessful school romances at length: Mary Jane Holmes’s Tempest and Sunshine (1854) and C. W. Bardeen’s Roderick Hume (1878). Both novels raise, then attempt to assuage, anxieties about female education, especially the ability of schoolmasters to govern young women’s untamed desires. Holmes brings an investment in common schooling to the sentimental novel; Bardeen brings the conventions of sentimentality to the reform novel. Though they write with different audiences in mind, both Holmes and Bardeen turn to the school romance to add interest and instruction to their texts. Their novels end differently, however: Tempest and Sunshine ends in disaster for the teacher, while Roderick Hume ends in disaster for the schoolgirl.

Mary Jane Holmes’s Tempest and Sunshine (1854) Mary Jane Holmes was no stranger to the classroom. Before she became one of the most successful and prolific writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, she worked as a schoolteacher for fifteen years.76 Even after she left teaching to write, she viewed her novels as educational, explaining that she aimed always to “write a good, pure, natural story, such as mothers are willing their daughters should read, and such as will do good instead of harm.”77

118 • Chapter 3 When Tempest and Sunshine was published, the publisher hoped for a success similar to that experienced by The Wide, Wide World, and he was not disappointed: within a few years, the novel sold over 250,000 copies.78 Holmes’s portrayal of seventeen-year-old Julia, the “Tempest” of the title, taps into both major concerns about female education: worries that schooling would increase rather than correct women’s taste for fashion and anxieties about the effects of education on female sexuality. Holmes seeks to assuage these anxieties, but she does so with difficulty. In her attempt to turn Julia’s story into a cautionary tale, Holmes presents not a unified vision of student-teacher romance, easily reducible, like Locke Amsden, to a manual for both school improvement and courtship behavior, but rather a series of new and incompatible visions of a student-teacher relationship gone wrong. The contortions her plot and characters undergo reflect Holmes’s commitment to providing a moral for her readers. Over the course of the novel, Julia changes from a scheming schoolgirl to an amoral villain to a repentant Christian, while Mr. Wilmot, her teacher-lover, in turn transforms from a tempted teacher to a maligned martyr to an angel of self-sacrifice. The reader, the author, and the characters all know Julia is a negative exemplar, but the only method for correcting her behavior the novel can imagine is inspiration from beyond the grave. Repeatedly proving herself beyond the reach of home and school influences, Julia presents a challenge to the very premise of mass education. Julia’s romance with her teacher, Mr. Wilmot, begins on the opening pages of the novel when he arrives at the Middletons’ home in Kentucky seeking a school. Richard Wilmot is a stranger from New York, “tall, well proportioned, and in every way prepossessing in his appearance.”79 This seems like an auspicious beginning; the schoolmaster is attractive, usually the first sign of a successful romance. But his fate is sealed in a matter of pages: “he could not help thinking there was something wondrously attractive in the glance of Julia’s large, dark eyes.”80 He has chosen the wrong sister. Julia, age seventeen, is dark, passionate, angry, and scheming, while her sister Fanny, age fifteen, is blonde, courteous, winning, and naïve. Only one of these sisters is worthy of school romance, and it is not Julia. If the initial description of Julia’s disposition were not enough to warn the reader this is so, Julia’s jealousy when Wilmot engages Fanny in conversation confirms that he has made the wrong choice. In revenge, Julia shows off her bookishness so that “poor Fanny was entirely cast into the background.” Julia’s vengefulness is a negative trait, but she is “really very intelligent, and a

Teachers and Temptresses • 119 very good scholar” with “good knowledge of all the standard works,” much like the heroines of successful school romances.81 The difference lies in Julia’s use of her knowledge. Rather than allowing her to share an intellectual companionship with her teacher, Julia’s knowledge empowers her to embarrass her sister and manipulate Mr. Wilmot. Mr. Wilmot, however, is blissfully unaware of these machinations. His good opinion falters briefly when Julia vents her rage on a slave, but she artfully turns the opportunity to her advantage. She confides to him that she has a “quick temper” she struggles to govern, then adds that if he will “as her teacher and friend, aid her by his advice and influence” she is sure she will succeed.82 Mr. Wilmot buys into this flattery, which collapses his roles as teacher and lover, our first indication that he rather relishes his superiority over Julia. Julia may be manipulative, but Wilmot is willing to be manipulated. Not only is it a problem that the schoolgirl is not initially flawless, but also that the schoolmaster falls in love, at least in part, with what he believes he can make her. We’ve traded Cinderella for Pygmalion, and here the focus on education clashes with the demands of the sentimental novel. Mr. Wilmot is confident that he alone can educate Julia because he understands her, unlike the father who calls her “Tempest” and the sister who fears her. The ability to mold students should be a positive trait in an educator, but it fits uneasily in a sentimental novel, as Julia’s faults threaten the claim to women’s moral superiority on which sentimentalism’s celebration of womanly influence rests. Within their student-teacher relationship, molding Julia’s morals is Wilmot’s duty, but, when they are considered as lovers, it is troubling that Julia lacks those traits from which women were to draw their rightful power. Because she lacks rightful power, Julia exercises wrongful power and blinds Mr. Wilmot to the extent of her evil nature, complicating his ability to teach her even while increasing his love for her. Julia uses Wilmot’s positive reaction to her flattery to coax a proposal. When Mr. Wilmot is offered a lucrative position at a school in Frankfort, Julia tells him she wishes to go along because “it will so lonely” without him, “the only person who understands” her. By “all others, whatever I do or say is construed into something bad,” she claims, adding, “I wish you were my brother, for then I might have been better than I am.” This, of course, prompts just the response Julia intended. Mr. Wilmot does not wish he were her brother, “for then [he] could never have claimed a dearer title.” Julia finally gets her declaration, and, as if readers did not have hints enough that this relationship will be a disaster, a thunderstorm begins: “just as Julia whispered a promise to be Mr. Wilmot’s

120 • Chapter 3 for ever, a blinding sheet of lightning lit up for a moment her dark features, and was instantly succeeded by a crash, which shook the whole house from its foundation.”83 At this point in the novel, Mr. Wilmot seems nearly as responsible for this relationship as Julia does: while she schemes and manipulates, he buys into her ploys because they feed his self importance. He even disregards a warning from another teacher, Mr. Miller, who once taught at the same school, Mr. Miller. The contrast drawn between Mr. Wilmot and Mr. Miller, who is interested in Fanny, makes it clear that Wilmot blinds himself to abundant evidence of Julia’s faults, so convinced is he that he can change her. That is, his faith that he is a good teacher keeps him from actually being one. For example, when Wilmot praises Julia’s ability to learn long lessons, Mr. Miller and Fanny piece together the truth: Julia writes her lessons on a piece of foolscap, which she hides under her desk while reciting. As usual, school romance has not actually increased the schoolgirl’s academic achievement, just the appearance of achievement. Mr. Miller understands “Julia’s character perfectly well, and he felt grieved that his friend should be so deceived in her.”84 But his attempts to set the record straight only prove the opposite as Julia actually studies for once and completes her recitation perfectly. To further discredit Mr. Miller’s suspicions, Julia pays off a slave to pretend that she is Fanny and yells at her viciously when Miller and Wilmot can hear, thus giving the impression that it is Fanny, not Julia, who has an uncontrollable temper. Not only does this artifice further convince Wilmot that Miller is mistaken, it also has a marked effect on Mr. Miller. Mr. Miller had “always thought of Fanny, as the embodiment of almost every female virtue” and “hope had often whispered to him of a joyous future, when she, whom her father designated as his ‘Sunshine,’ should also shed a halo of sunlight around another fireside.” In light of this event, however, the “illusion was painfully dispelled, for sooner would he have taken the Egyptian asp to his bosom, than chosen for a companion one whom he knew to possess a hasty violent temper.”85 Although Mr. Miller draws his conclusions based on insufficient evidence, he serves as a foil to Mr. Wilmot, who denies the ample evidence of Julia’s temper. Miller hates Julia, which we are to read as a sign of his good judgment, but this hatred is also the complement of his love for Sunshine. For Miller, Julia functions as an example of what Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson have labeled the “mythic sexualized schoolgirl.” Such girls are “made to carry the denied (even repressed) sexuality which is everywhere present/‘absent’ in

Teachers and Temptresses • 121 the school” and labeled as “sad case[s]” to contain the “threat of [their] overt sexuality.”86 The distinction drawn between Mr. Miller’s love for Fanny and Mr. Wilmot’s love for Julia reflects the distinction between successful and unsuccessful school romances more broadly: successful romances are, at least overtly, not about sex. Disdaining the heavily sexualized Julia in preference for the blonde and pure Fanny licenses Miller’s attraction to his student, though she was a mere fourteen when he was her teacher, because he was attracted to her purity of heart. And unlike Mr. Wilmot, he never voices his interest in his student while he is still her teacher. By drawing a strong contrast between Mr. Wilmot and Mr. Miller, Holmes implies that those who ignore glaring faults in their partners are in part responsible for their own fates. The tempted teacher is as much to blame as the seductive schoolgirl for their relationship and the immoral actions it inspires Julia to take. But this nuance quickly disappears: what starts out as a complex meditation on the dangers of student-teacher romance, its negative impact on student achievement, and the dangerous appeal of flattery to male lovers becomes a cautionary tale for young women. As soon as they arrive in Frankfort, Wilmot begins to lose Julia. Julia desired him for his respected status and his physical attractiveness, but when she meets men with higher status and better looks, her feelings fade. Women of fashion fuel her change of heart, remarking that with her “extreme beauty and great fortune,” she could “command a more eligible match than a poor pedagogue.” This scene unites the two anxieties about female education commonly expressed in the nineteenth century: not only does schooling stimulate Julia’s sexual desire, but it also exposes her to women of fashion, whose claims her education has not taught her to discredit. In rural Kentucky, Wilmot commanded status as an educator, but in the city, Julia meets men with greater prestige, including Dr. Lacey, a wealthy man who expresses interest in Fanny. “That day Mr. Wilmot’s eyes were not so handsome, nor his teeth so white as usual” and “for the first time in her life, Julia was not much pleased to see him.”87 After meeting Dr. Lacey, Julia goes so far as to imagine Mr. Wilmot’s death: “In fancy she beheld Dr. Lacey at her feet, with his handsome person, princely fortune, and magnificent home near New Orleans, while off in the dim distance loomed up a dark coffin, in which was the cold, pale form of one whom she knew too well.”88 Before, Julia seemed merely manipulative, but at this point, she is willing to bury her teacher-lover for her own advancement. Because she is motivated by desire, not morality, Julia easily transfers her affections to a new object that better meets her sexual and economic ambitions.

122 • Chapter 3 Julia has become an extreme example of everything critics of female education feared: a highly sexualized, amoral woman of fashion. She has changed from seductive schoolgirl to pure villain—a change that makes her the perfect subject of a cautionary tale. But what is Holmes cautioning against? Young women following Julia’s path, or the schooling that facilitated rather than prevented her downfall? Julia’s daydream proves prescient. Within a few weeks, Mr. Wilmot contracts typhoid fever, the start of his own transformation, from tempted teacher to maligned martyr. He calls Julia to his bedside, but she will not go, claiming that she “never liked” him “very much.” She “would not have acknowledged that she hoped he would die, and yet each time that she heard he was better, her spirits sank, for fear he would yet live.” When she hears that he is recovering, Julia writes him a letter dissolving their engagement. Upon receiving it, he instantly relapses. The fact that Mr. Wilmot was getting better until the arrival of the letter makes Holmes’s point perfectly clear. Mrs. Middleton articulates it: “on you, Julia, rests in a measure the cause of his death.” Unlike the mothers in other unsuccessful school romances, who routinely share blame with their daughters, Mrs. Middleton attempts to correct her daughter’s path, albeit ineffectually. Her mother makes this accusation before Wilmot dies, leaving Julia with a chance to change course, but she refuses because doing so would “seriously affect [her] plans for the future,” her designs on Dr. Lacey.89 The scene of Mr. Wilmot’s death is heavy-handed in laying blame on Julia. Wilmot’s sister Kate arrives to echo Mrs. Middleton’s condemnation. The scene also highlights the strength of Wilmot’s love. Gone is the sense that he too has acted inappropriately, that he, like other schoolmasters in unsuccessful romances, is worthy of punishment. Instead, he emerges as an idealized and long-suffering lover. Until his last moments, he believes Julia’s letter to be a forgery and even when he learns the truth, he still hopes to see Julia in heaven. Wilmot’s end is presented as a martyr’s death, a punishment for Julia’s sins, not his, and it will eventually become a force for Julia’s transformation, though not for a few hundred pages. The scene oddly effeminates the teacher; after all, we are accustomed to associating such redemptive deaths with young girls like Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s Eva and Little Women’s Beth March.90 This is perhaps the only evidence that Wilmot bears any blame for his tragic end—that he allows Julia to unman him—but it also works to make Julia’s crime seem still worse. At the start of the novel, Wilmot is virile enough a specimen to attract Julia, but by the end she uses her influence to deprive him

Teachers and Temptresses • 123 of both his manhood and his life. Not only is schooling destructive to her womanhood, but it is destructive to her teacher’s manhood as well. Instead of providing proper gender socialization, the school becomes a place where gender norms unravel. With his death, Wilmot becomes a martyr, mourned by every righteous character in the novel. But, at first, Julia becomes still more villainous: she schemes to steal Dr. Lacey away from Fanny for three hundred pages and nearly succeeds, after which she fakes suicide and runs away. Julia finally returns home after another major (and unbelievable) change in her character. She has repented and apologizes to Wilmot’s sister for his death: “that one dreadful crime has troubled me more than all the rest. I killed him, your noble brother, and from the moment I deliberately determined to do so, I became leagued with the tempter, who lured me madly on.” Even she seems to have forgotten the tempted teacher of the early pages of the novel, treating her former lover instead as an angel guiding her transformation. While Julia’s mother charges her with being only “in a measure” responsible for Wilmot’s death, here Julia directly states that she killed him, taking full responsibility. This responsibility proves a severe punishment, and an educational one, helping Julia to slowly remake her life. The narrator reassures us: “Lest the reader should think us guilty of exaggeration and so credit nothing we have written, we must tell them that Julia was not wholly and entirely changed. But good influences were at work.”91 It is important for the reader to “credit” the text with realism for Julia’s story to serve as an education for readers. Previously, Julia was beyond the reach of moral influences, but her transformation is intended to fuel the reader’s own, even though it seems incompatible with Julia’s character throughout the novel. The change in Julia also redeems education: the seemingly uneducable protagonist has finally learned her lesson. While schooling paved the way for Julia’s downfall, it also provides the means for recovery, through the agency of a teacher, tempted no more. After emphasizing the severity of Julia’s crime, Holmes dismisses it once Julia repents, surely a Christian ending, but one that also turns Mr. Wilmot into an educational tool. He so loves his favorite student, it seems, that he dies so she might be saved, and readers are given reason to believe that he will see her in heaven, as he fervently hopes. In the aftermath of his death, Mr. Wilmot becomes the ultimate teacher, a mere cipher for his student’s education who fades away when his job is complete. This angel of self-sacrifice looks nothing like the tempted teacher of the novel’s early pages, but this postmortem transformation proves necessary for Holmes to salvage her

124 • Chapter 3 novel’s educational potential. Wilmot is transformed from a figure that would have troubled reformers, a teacher too blind to his student’s faults to correct them, to an educator so powerful his influence extends beyond the grave. This influence is necessary to eliminate the anxieties about female education the novel raises, that schools would turn out women of fashion and arouse young women’s sexuality. Julia is no longer fashionable or sexy: instead, she is a repentant Christian, espousing the morality schooling was intended to teach. Even so, the novel is not entirely successful in silencing the fears it voices. The interlude of three hundred pages between Wilmot’s death and Julia’s repentance, filled with sensationalism, reveals a certain relish in Julia’s bad actions, even as the ending rejects them. Rather than a unified condemnation of Julia’s machinations and Wilmot’s weakness, Holmes presents readers with a series of new and incompatible visions of this student-teacher relationship. Her difficulties harnessing her novel’s educational promise, despite her faith in the educative power of both schooling and fiction, are symptomatic of the difficulties of schooling readers through unsuccessful romance, as we have seen above.

C. W. Bardeen’s Roderick Hume (1878) Roderick Hume provides an interesting counterpoint to Tempest and Sunshine, though it too presents a contradictory picture of school romance. While Holmes attempted to tap into the market of texts like The Wide, Wide World, C. W. Bardeen appeals to an audience similar to that of Locke Amsden, parents, educators, and friends of education. Despite this difference, Bardeen shared Holmes’s investment in fiction as a vehicle of education. He ran an educational publishing firm, writing most of the literary titles he published himself, including a sequel to Roderick Hume, entitled Commissioner Hume, discussed above.92 Much as Bardeen intended, the novel was perceived as an asset to educators, appearing first in the School Bulletin, then in book form, and finally as part of the Standard Teachers’ Library in the 1890s. Reviewers dwelt on both Bardeen’s literary success—many compared him to Dickens— and his reformist intentions.93 As with Locke Amsden, reviewers remarked favorably on the love story. Nor is this the work’s only charm: Roderick Hume reads far more like a novel than Locke Amsden and similar stories, though it is replete with information on school discipline, school board politics, and even textbook ordering. The novel opens with Bardeen’s assurance that he wrote the story based

Teachers and Temptresses • 125 on his own experiences, “trusting his fancy just far enough to weave into one web characters and incidents which were real but disconnected.”94 Bardeen’s truth claims declare his generic allegiances: like other authors of reform fiction, he takes pains to assure readers that his fiction is truer than the truth. But like Holmes, Bardeen also draws on the conventions of sentimentalism, presenting readers with an angelic heroine, worthy of the schoolmaster’s love, and a demonic villain, who comes to well-deserved ruin. He too raises cultural anxieties about female education, concerns about women of fashion and sexualized schoolgirls, and attempts to quell them. And like Holmes, he struggles to do so. The unsuccessful romance between schoolmaster Roderick Hume and his student, Victoria Blarston, is blamed on Victoria, much as Holmes blames Julia for her relationship with Mr. Wilmot, but Bardeen has even greater difficulty than Holmes in resolving the narrative in an educative manner. Offering a portrait of an uncontrollable schoolgirl, Bardeen himself loses control over the text. While Julia’s disruptive impulses are ultimately contained at the end of Tempest and Sunshine, Vic can barely be silenced on Roderick Hume’s final pages. As in Tempest and Sunshine, romance is central to Roderick Hume from the start. Roderick arrives in Norway, New York, seeking work at the union school, which has a primary department as well as what we would now consider middle and high school grades. When Roderick is interviewed by a member of the school board and reveals he is not married, the trustee replies, “I think you ought to be,” for a school is a “dangerous place to put a lusty young bachelor. Ten school-ma’ams, all good-looking and gushing. Regular cock o’ the walk.” Roderick interrupts him angrily, explaining that as principal he shall “deem it part of [his] duty to protect the reputations of [his] fellowteachers” as though they were his sisters.95 But it’s the tone, not the content, of the trustee’s remark that rankles Roderick, as his later conduct shows. The trustee’s statement proves prescient: two of his fellow teachers and one of his students do fall for the young principal, and Roderick scarcely discourages their advances. We get our first hint that Roderick is naturally attractive when he meets Eunice Bell, the “prettiest girl in the village” and one of the teachers at his school. Roderick walks Eunice home and is mildly tempted by her: “He held Miss Bell’s hand a moment when he bade her good-night; but it was because the hand was slender and soft and cool.” In reality, his “heart was in his work in the big brick schoolhouse” and he quickly forgets Eunice. She, in contrast, passes a sleepless night, expending enough “mental effort” to master “a book

126 • Chapter 3 of Euclid” deciding the color of her wedding dress. Even though the novel’s primary interest is in presenting educational ideas, the narrator doesn’t miss this opportunity to teach a lesson on gender and courtship, much like other school romances. Roderick fails to notice how much of the conversation he must support, and the narrator explains that this is why “brilliant men marry stupid women.” A smart young man bores “the ordinary young woman, who has no patience with such nonsense,” while a “superior” young woman bores him. “But the stupid young woman listens to him hours at a time, till he thanks Heaven for adorning the earth with one soul capable of appreciating him.” The passage is quite harsh to Miss Bell, teaching readers by negative example the dangers of a seemingly innocent form of flirtation, excessive adulation. Nor does Roderick escape judgment. He appears to be plagued with the same character flaw that leads to Mr. Wilmot’s downfall: vanity. Because Eunice flatters him, he enjoys her company more than he ought, a sign of things to come.96 Luckily for his career, Roderick had “long ago resolved to enter no society but the best, and especially to marry no woman whom he might outgrow”—another courtship lesson for readers.97 Although he continues his flirtation with Eunice long enough for her to author the poem with which this chapter begins, Roderick’s most ardent affections are reserved for another schoolmistress, Mary Lowe, an exemplary teacher. In due course, he realizes that “his calm, quiet, intellectual preceptress was a charming young woman, full of fun, and gifted with extraordinary kindness and tact.”98 Like a true sentimental heroine, she improves him greatly, using her influence to inspire self-examination and to correct his vanity. Because of her exemplarity, she is awarded with Roderick’s love. He quickly gains her promise that her “thoughts will always be in unison” with his.99 (Yes, this is another barely noticeable marriage proposal.) But Roderick Hume is not a simple story of a principal turning his assistant in school into his assistant for life. This romance is foiled—and it’s foiled by a student who is also in love with Roderick, much as Eunice’s poem predicts. From the start, eighteen-year-old Victoria Blarston is interested in her teacher and, like many other schoolgirls in unsuccessful romances, she schemes to win his attentions. Thus, she is very pleased when he decides to award her a composition prize. Mary is shocked when he tells her Victoria has won because she doesn’t “believe Miss Blarston ever had an original thought.” When Victoria (referred to as Vic, just as the unfeminine Frances is called Frank in “Catching the Schoolmaster”) reads her essay aloud at the school exhibition,

Teachers and Temptresses • 127 Mary recognizes it instantly. Like Elvira in A New-England Tale, discussed in chapter 1, Vic must cheat to achieve glory, and, like her predecessor, she is publicly humiliated for doing so. Her essay plagiarizes Walden nearly word for word, “except where, abysm of humiliation,” Roderick had “found flaws in her style and suggested more felicitous expressions.” Roderick is humiliated—one of the many lessons for teachers the novel offers is humility—but not nearly so much as Vic. She flushes but never flinches “under the blaze of four hundred eyes.” Her mother is moved to wrath, but her father feels admiration for “his bold, handsome, indomitable daughter” and carries her “off in triumph.” Victoria cheats, yet her parents are proud of her and angry at the master, our first indication that, like many schoolgirls in unsuccessful school romances, Victoria’s parents are in part to blame for her behavior.100 Much like Julia, Vic seeks revenge on those who expose her flaws. Vic conceives a deep hatred for Mary and frames her for cheating on the state math exam so she loses her job. Though “the light had gone out of Roderick’s life,” he continues to do his work faithfully.101 His sadness, visible to his students, moves the “more sentimental of the girls” to “tender interest” in him.102 Roderick’s broken heart and fresh availability attract his schoolgirls to him, none more so than Victoria. Taking a page from Julia’s book, she comes to the schoolroom under the guise of apologizing for her stolen essay. Encouraged by Roderick’s kindness, Victoria sobs, “I hated myself! When father came over, and offered me his arm, and said, ‘I was never so proud of you in my life, Vic,’ I would have given the world to hide my face that instant in my grave.” For good measure, after indicting her father for her false upbringing, she also condemns her mother: “it is awful to be brought up as I have been, and to learn only by branding what other children drink in with their mother’s milk!” Bardeen here presents an educational fantasy, a student turning away from her parents and their evil ways and toward her forgiving schoolmaster, and the scene nearly works as such, as readers do not yet know that Vic framed Mary to get her away from Roderick, although a “phosphorescent gleam” appears in her eyes each time she mentions Mary.103 The hints that Vic’s penitence is not quite what it seems multiply as the scene continues, but the depth of her deception isn’t revealed until the final pages. While Holmes reminds readers of Julia’s “tempestuous” nature at every turn, Bardeen leaves space for the reader to come to her own conclusions, which adds suspense and works to excuse Roderick for being duped, as the reader may be similarly fooled. The fact that Vic’s depravity is not entirely visible also contributes to the book’s lessons in courtship: appearances are not

128 • Chapter 3 always what they seem, and young people ought to take care that they probe a lover’s character rather than accepting a façade as truth. Vic presents a convincing front to Roderick, confessing that her great dream is to “be a lady.” Vic is keenly aware that her family’s recent increase in wealth did not increase the respect given to them because they are “vulgar” in habits, “in thought, in ambition, in life.” Unlike most heroines of sentimental fiction, Vic must seek guidance as to how to be a lady rather than inhabiting the role naturally. To achieve her goals, Vic takes Mary as her model, quite literally, dressing in a “direct copy” of one of Mary’s gowns. And Roderick applauds her attempts. He assures her that her efforts will not be in vain, unwittingly fueling her feelings for him: “You have health, energy, and mental vigor. You have wealth and beauty, two positive elements of power.”104 After this encounter, Victoria comes to Roderick for counsel frequently; very shortly she “crosse[s] the threshold of womanhood” and consciously loves Roderick with “the passion of an impetuous nature.”105 Taken at face value, which is precisely how Roderick takes it, Vic’s plan for personal improvement marks her not only as a failed sentimental heroine, but also as the dream student of school reformers, capable of identifying the knowledge she needs and trusting the school to provide it. She comes to school seeking a corrective to her family’s teachings, hoping to learn those values that give dignity independent of wealth, as well as the gender-appropriate behaviors that will turn a rich girl into a lady. As in Tempest and Sunshine, generic conventions come into conflict with an investment in education. While sentimentalism privileges the flawless paragon, the naturally flawless have little need for the personal transformation schooling promises, and Vic clearly desires just such a transformation. She imagines schooling can smooth away the rough edges of her new-money classlessness and lift her out of the position of her birth and into the one she deserves. Turning away from her family and towards her teacher, Vic seems to represent a reformist fantasy, an ideal test case for the power of common schooling. As we saw in chapter 1, however, common school narratives often present attempts to rise negatively, and such is the case in Roderick Hume as well. Because her motive for improving herself is inappropriate—she seeks her teacher’s love rather than greater culture—ultimately readers are asked to root against Victoria. Hiding her true goal, Vic replicates reform discourse nearly flawlessly, and in so doing she wins Roderick over. Her ability to imitate this discourse is a sign of both its widespread diffusion and the ease with which this lofty rhetoric could be perverted for other aims. Interestingly, given that Bardeen was

Teachers and Temptresses • 129 himself a school reformer, this scene demonstrates the elasticity of the rhetoric of school reform. Through the character of Vic, Bardeen demonstrates that motives matter, that all those who speak the language of reform are not actually, as reformers styled themselves, friends of education. Vic understands and appreciates the power of schooling, but she seeks to use the school for romantic rather than intellectual or moral advancement, for a personal agenda, not the common good. Given the investment in reform that animates the novel, this scene sits uncomfortably within it. Does Vic’s deployment of the language of reform excuse Roderick for pitying her, or is it a dangerous form of flattery? If Roderick is merely interested in molding Vic as a student, why mention her beauty? This scene seems to establish Vic as a test case for mass education, but then quickly begins the task of distancing her teachers from her failures by hinting at the ways in which Vic deviates from the goals she expresses. Her decision to copy Mary’s dress, for example, shows that she mistakenly equates being a lady with appearances, and the description of her feelings for Roderick as “the passion of an impetuous nature” reads as a thinly veiled reference to sexual desire, two issues, as we have seen, which generate anxiety about education for women. Vic may be capable of parroting the aims of schooling, these hints imply, but not of understanding them, subverting them in service of her own aims. Unlike many of his literary counterparts, Roderick buys into Vic’s penitence and tries to help her without falling in love with her. She loves in him what the heroines of successful romances love in their masters, his kindness and sympathy, but also his ability to lead “her mind into new fields of thought, her life into new relations, her soul into new motives.” Even if these new motives be high-minded, Vic cannot catch the master because she needs to change, and, as we have seen, school romances only work out for flawless heroines. When Roderick realizes that she is in love with him, he notes in his journal that her plan to supplant Mary in his affections is “[p]reposterous.”106 When Vic learns of his feelings, she decides yet again to exact revenge—this time, on Roderick. Through a complicated series of events, the school board comes to reconsider the issue of the state test, and Vic testifies that she saw Roderick copy the test questions into Mary’s notebook. In a dramatic finale, all three of Roderick’s school lovers come together to decide his fate, Victoria to accuse and Eunice and Mary to vindicate. This final showdown represents not only how out of control student-teacher interactions could become, but also the novel’s final statement on questions of courtship and the importance of gender normativity.

130 • Chapter 3 Throughout the scene, Roderick’s attention is captivated by Vic, whose villainy is now on full display. He is convinced Mary was right to hate her, as she is “absolutely without moral principle.” Instead of understanding his role in leading her to this course, his unintentional invitation of her attentions, he concludes, “Truly woman is past finding out.”107 Of course her teachers cannot be held responsible for Vic’s behavior: she is female, after all, and that most dangerous species of female, a beautiful and wealthy teen. The novel does not inquire into how her position as a young woman makes such indirection and subterfuge necessary if she wishes to play a role in deciding her own romantic future. Instead, the female paragon, the flawless heroine, returns to save the day. Mary deduces how Victoria managed to frame her teachers just in time to clear their names. Vic does get the opportunity to explain herself, and her explanation reveals both her utter unsuitability for school romance and, once again, her ability to deploy the rhetoric of reformers for alternate ends. “I did all this to injure Miss Lowe. Do you want to know why? It is because I hate her!” Vic proclaims, her eyes “glitter[ing] balefully” while her “every muscle quivered with passion long-repressed.” This hate was born of love, Vic claims: when Mary first came to Norway, Vic worshipped her, but Mary “instinctively disliked” her and embarrassed her for telling lies. “If she had talked with me kindly I should never have told another,” Vic explains, but “she disgraced me before the class.” At first, this speech reads like a severe indictment of Mary as a teacher. Vic once again demonstrates her fluency in the rhetoric of school reform, condemning her schoolmistress for failing to employ moral suasion and fulfill the role of mother-teacher. While Mary’s conduct does not excuse Vic’s behavior, it would seem to explain it and to condemn Mary, thus far a fountain of goodness, rather severely. Nor does Vic’s speech end here. She explains how Roderick “found something good in her,” claiming that she plagiarized her composition because she despaired of impressing him. When she learned that Roderick loved Mary, she realized she loved him too. “I could see within myself the germ of something better than I had dreamed of,” she relates, and “I knew he had planted it there, and he alone could develop it.” Vic, it appears, fell in love with education, attracted by the person her teacher could make her, seemingly a positive change but, in a context that privileged flawless heroines, a sign that she is unworthy of school romance. She again condemns Mary: “in all my wicked life I never committed such a sin as she commits this moment, when she sits there without a thought of sympathy for me, who have felt wrong impulses,

Teachers and Temptresses • 131 and have struggled harder to be no worse than I am than she ever did to be perfect.” Given Vic’s upbringing and Mary’s seemingly effortless virtue, Vic’s assessment actually seems accurate, and a lack of sympathy is a severe indictment of a character inspired by sentimental heroines. Vic exposes the fundamental contradiction of the school romance: only those who do not need schooling prove worthy of it.108 Finally, Vic takes aim at Roderick, chastising him for ridiculing her “honest affection,” then wraps up with a dramatic proclamation: “I tell you all that the day shall be when you will be proud that you once knew me [. . .]. Miss Lowe, you shall have your Roderick [. . .] but I tell you the day shall be when he sits in your humdrum household and reflects with chagrin on what he might have been, had not your faultless, passionless countenance come between him and a woman who, underneath her faults, has a power for loving and for action that you never dreamed of.”109 This ending is stunning, a dramatic and impassioned declaration that conventional femininity is mundane and undesirable. Rather than relying on Roderick to help her to change, here Vic proclaims her power to change him, mourning the man he might have been had he never met Mary. The student, it seems, wishes to become the teacher, a resolution that threatens the lessons of the rest of the text. Surely we are to read these as the ravings of a madwoman, the last act of revenge of an uncontrollable schoolgirl, as it seems all but impossible that a nineteenth-century school story would conclude with a swipe at the sex/gender system that the rest of the text upholds. Because Mary is the novel’s ideal and Vic its villain, Vic’s swipe at gender conventions reads not as a serious challenge, but rather as the final sign that her obsession with fashion and her sexual desire have pushed her over the edge. This extreme conclusion completes the reader’s education on courtship norms: nice girls, it seems, do finish first, as Mary, not Vic, gets to marry the master. But, though we are meant to discredit her, Vic’s speech is rational and in consonance with the details of the story, just not with its reformist thrust. She is angry about her teachers’ failures to love and educate her as they should, Mary for not giving her the chance to reform, Roderick for toying with her emotions. Even if we are to read this speech, which spans six pages, as a series of deluded rationalizations, composed ex post facto by a spurned schoolgirl, it seems Bardeen has lost control of the novel’s sensational aspects, since Vic’s powerful speech threatens to overwhelm the goal of the text by reflecting negatively on the teachers the novel holds up as exemplars. Once again, relationships born in the school have spiraled out of control: a simple school board

132 • Chapter 3 meeting becomes a scene of high drama, complete with a hellish teen whose eyes glow phosphorescently. The dramatic denouement of the romance plot threatens to overshadow the lessons about schooling that drive the novel, evidence of the uneasy negotiation of the educational and the literary, even in a text with a transparent reform agenda. The late publication date of this novel goes some distance to explaining why Roderick and Mary are not ultimately held responsible for Vic’s actions. Vic appears to be a kind of special case, a bad apple for whose inner evil her teachers cannot be held responsible. (She does, after all, have terrible parents.) By 1878, when Roderick Hume was published, Bardeen was invested in improving the school system, which had already been built, especially in states like New York, where the novel is set. While Bardeen echoes many of the concerns of earlier reformers—condemning unsafe or ill-cared-for schoolrooms, calling for clearer standards for hiring teachers, criticizing school board politics—he need not have the same investment in expanding access to schooling as earlier writers. Since this is true, he can indulge the possibility of a schoolgirl incapable of being schooled because of her nature and upbringing, an idea to which schoolmen regularly had recourse in the 1870s and 1880s, when common schools failed to usher in utopia as promised.110 Even Vic’s final assertion that those listening will someday be proud of her rings hollow, as it is followed by her father’s claim that this is the “proudest moment” of his life, a variation on his reaction after her plagiarism was unmasked, and she only changed for the worse after that episode.111 Nonetheless, Vic is a discomfiting character, and ultimately a far more memorable one than either of her teachers. The last pages of the novel are largely given over to her speech, rather like the three hundred pages allotted to Julia’s evil actions in Tempest and Sunshine before she reforms, and the space devoted to her voice ultimately makes her a difficult character to silence, despite the threat she poses to the premises of both female education and common schooling. Unlike Julia, who lives to reform, Vic is spirited away from town in the end, leaving the man she loves in the arms of the woman she hates, the two teachers rewarded with the gift of one another. Surprisingly, while Holmes’s sentimental novel ends in an educational triumph, Bardeen’s reform novel ends in an educational failure, one for which teachers are excused and a student is punished. Bardeen raises the dominant anxieties about female education, presumably with the intent of mitigating them, given his commitment to reform, but Vic’s final act threatens to reinforce rather than erase these fears. Some girls, it seems, are capable of being taught by

Teachers and Temptresses • 133 two exemplary teachers without becoming morally upstanding, gender-normative young ladies. Rather than blaming schools and teachers, through the extreme portrait of Vic, Bardeen instead teaches his readers that some individuals are simply uneducable: the problem is human nature, not the school system. Roderick Hume, then, ends much like The Hoosier Schoolmaster, as discussed in chapter 2: both novels seek to reaffirm the importance of schooling even while demonstrating its limits.

• Whether they are fiercely theatrical, like Roderick Hume, or simply sweet, like most successful school romances, common school narratives offer us a new vision of common school life by making student-teacher romance visible as other primary sources have not. At the heart of fictional romances are anxieties about mass education for women, concerns about female sexuality and about whether schooling properly prepared girls for wife- and motherhood. Alternately offering fantasies of perfect schoolgirls and their paragon teachers or nightmarish visions of young women spiraling out of control, these narratives do more than reflect on school life: they school readers, offering lessons in gender and courtship. But unsuccessful romances in particular do so in complex ways, ways that reveal how generic conventions could complement or compete with authors’ educational aims. These failed romances offer a vision of the school as a space out of control, a space in which personal relationships complicate the power of the teacher’s position. Instead of controlling the schoolhouse and his students, the teacher is threatened by his students’ actions and, frequently, by his own emotions. By attempting to seduce their teachers, bad girls like Vic and Julia wrest control from them: Vic almost destroys Roderick’s career, while Julia is partially responsible for Wilmot’s death. School fictions often attempt to silence concerns about female education, but doing so proves difficult. As such, they reflect continuing attempts to negotiate and renegotiate the meaning, promise, and perils of mass education, even once coeducation was firmly established. While successful romances tend to offer a reassuring vision of the power of common schooling, failed romances force authors to confront the limits of the common school. School romances also highlight the permeability of the boundary between school and home. At their heart, they are about the potential of relationships forged inside the school spilling outside it, forming the basis of new families.

134 • Chapter 3 School romances weren’t the only way schoolteachers took their work home in the nineteenth century, however. Marrying one’s students was a privilege largely reserved for male teachers, but the schoolmistress had a different option, adoption, as we will see in chapter 4.

4

Parents and Patrons

As we have seen, nineteenth-century fiction imagines a variety of seemingly incompatible roles for the schoolmaster: director of juvenile theatricals, pseudointellectual buffoon, enemy combatant, willing collaborator, scheming seducer, idealized lover. Depictions of the schoolmistress, however, reflect no such diversity, because her role was abundantly clear. With hard work and firm resolve, the schoolmaster could hope to turn his schoolroom into a little republic, but with natural grace and free-flowing love, the schoolmistress was expected to turn her schoolroom into a home. Writing for the American Phrenological Journal in 1867, an anonymous commentator summed up reformers’ vision, promoted relentlessly from the 1830s on: the schoolmistress was to act as a mother to each student, and, as such, was to “love the child, to regard it with the eye of prophecy, to see what it is capable of doing and becoming, and to lead its mind by proper encouragement and assistance to take hold on and appreciate the noble and the true.”1 Even after female teachers became commonplace, reformers’ image of the mother-teacher remained “firmly implanted in the educational and popular literature of the day and continued to be invoked by state and local officials.”2 Immense faith in the ability of female teachers to transform students through love was instrumental in shifting the composition of the teaching force from largely male to largely female between 1830 and 1870.3 Contemporary understandings of women’s nature and financial exigencies worked together to encourage and justify the feminization of teaching, particularly at the elementary level. To make schoolteaching acceptable work for women, reformers redefined the school as a fundamentally similar to the home and teaching as an extension of mothering.4 Women’s natural love for children

136 • Chapter 4 and strong parental impulses, reformers believed, would translate well into the schoolroom and allow them to govern their students with moral suasion, a position echoed in stories like “Our School Teachers” and “Patty Dree, Schoolmarm,” as we saw in chapter 2. Further, because, unlike men, women could not aspire to “worldly successes,” they could “place the welfare of the students, and for that matter of society as a whole, before monetary gain,” an advantage to both students and the school budget.5 But teaching was not only an opportunity for selfless service. Instead, it was presented as a preparatory prelude to the role of wife and mother, an opportunity to practice the skills and attitudes necessary for raising one’s own children.6 As Horace Mann put it, “no occupation or apprenticeship” would be so “serviceable” to future mothers as teaching.7 These arguments, paired with the great need for teachers at a low price, proved effective. By 1860, women comprised 84 percent of the rural teaching force in New England, 79 percent in New York, 59 percent in the Mid-Atlantic states, 86 percent in the upper Midwest, and 58 percent in the lower Midwest.8 By the 1880s, women teachers outnumbered men by a ratio of more than three to one nationwide.9 The tendency to limit public schooling to the elementary level allowed women to fill these jobs without having a great deal of education themselves. And because teaching was “subprofessional,” bringing “neither status nor remuneration sufficient to attract and hold ambitious men,” few men challenged women’s right to teach.10 As a result, historians agree, the feminization of teaching was accepted without much dissent. Reformers generally downplayed the independence teaching would afford women, though this benefit was certainly clear to commentators like Catharine Beecher and Margaret Fuller, and, as we shall see, to many writers of fiction. Beecher saw the opening of teaching to women as an opportunity to create a respected profession for unmarried women, claiming that the female sex was degraded because there was no road to “competence, influence, and honor” outside of marriage.11 According to Joanne Preston, prescriptions for the female schoolteacher matched neither the aspirations nor the experiences of real nineteenth-century teachers.12 In their letters and journals, teachers frequently described their relationships with students in “intellectual rather than emotional terms, usually sounding more like psychologists than mothers.”13 Most entered the field not out of a love of children, but rather out of financial need, the desire for independence and social status, or the hope of inspiring social, political, or spiritual change.14 Even while the model of the mother-teacher was being promoted extensively, women took advantage of

Parents and Patrons • 137 the opportunity the model created without necessarily embracing the model itself. Thus, we should not confuse the growing number of women teachers with complete acceptance of the idea of the schoolmistress as mother. Nor did reformers intend to elide the distinction between home and school entirely. While they used metaphors of home and family to ease anxieties about the school’s intervention into childrearing, their writings make it clear that the home and school were imagined as distinct institutions. In fact, reformers frequently elevate the school above the home and the teacher above the parent. Though reformers agreed that “the kindest feeling should exist between teacher and parent,” few believed that such feeling was universally possible.15 Especially when parents were deemed unfit, an assessment often implicitly tied to race, class, or national origin, the teacher was to take over the role of parent.16 One contributor to the Connecticut Common School Journal, for example, celebrated the role of the teacher in providing the “first lessons of truth” to those children who are raised in “homes made wretched by vice.”17 A writer for the Episcopal Recorder put it more bluntly: How can parents be expected to provide moral education “when parents themselves have no morals?”18 In Moral Culture of Infancy (1863), mother-teacher par excellence Mary Peabody Mann mentions with pride those instances in which she has been “preferred before the mother” by her students because she is “the fountain of knowledge and even of tenderness to starved and neglected little souls.”19 Although the union of parent and teacher working for the child’s best interest is treated as ideal, these examples show that reformers did not mince words when parents were morally or intellectually unfit: the influence of the motherteacher must be used to counteract the lessons of the home. After all, if the school and the home were to provide precisely the same lessons, why would the school be needed at all?

Fictionalizing the Mother-Teacher Model As we might expect, given reformers’ zealous efforts to promulgate the ideal, some common school fiction, especially stories published early in the century, reflects the understanding of the schoolmistress as mother-teacher. For example, Sarah Josepha Hale’s Sketches of American Character (1829) contains what is essentially an extended argument for the feminization of teaching disguised as a pair of short stories. The idealized heroine, Elizabeth Brooks, is “adored by her pupils, and respected and beloved like a relative by their parents.”20 She only leaves teaching, which she greatly enjoys, when a former

138 • Chapter 4 lover, now a widower, asks her to marry him, agreeing to do so for the sake of his two small daughters, who greatly need motherly care. The relationship between Elizabeth and her pupils, as well as her use of teaching as a prelude to motherhood, clearly exemplifies the ideal of reformers. Mary Smith in Warren Burton’s The District School as It Was (1833), introduced in chapter 1, also reflects this model. The narrator describes her as a “sweet angel,” “a mother to me in tenderness,” who disciplines with “sympathy rather than reproof” and possesses a keen sense of child nature.21 To strengthen the book’s argument for the mother-teacher model, Burton contrasts her with another schoolmistress, Mehitabel Holt, who inflicts horrible punishments, keeps “childhood in bondage,” and makes schooling “a pain to the body, a weariness to the mind, and a disgust to the heart.”22 These texts and others like them promote the image, prevalent in reform writings, of the teacher as a mother-figure, gathering children to her lap and heart in a peaceful, idyllic, and productive schoolroom. A reform-minded narrative published in the National Era, Mary Irving’s “The Teacher’s Trial and Reward” (1853), provides a particularly strong example of a fictional endorsement of the mother-teacher model, schooling readers by responding to criticisms of the ideal. In the story, a young schoolmistress comes home complaining of the difficulties she faces each day. At first, the story seems to take aim at the idealization of teaching central to the motherteacher model. Mary vents to Aunt Hannah: “There is a fine drapery of romance thrown about the ideal of teaching, that will bear little of the rough handling of reality. It is delightful in perspective—this enthroning yourself on a pyramid of young hearts, whose up-gushings are to waft you into the seventh heaven of self-complacency. It is delicious to fancy yourself the prime mover of an electrical battery, whose wires shall vibrate simultaneously in a hundred small breasts, at your lightest touch. But delusion is written on all those daydreams!”23 Perhaps Mary has been reading school fiction: texts like Sketches of American Character and The District School provide prime examples of just the kind of “drapery of romance” she describes. In the context of school fiction, this passage is humorous, since the language Mary offers in jest is precisely that which other school stories employ seriously, to mystify and elevate the schoolmistress’ work. This speech seems like a condemnation of the overinflated rhetoric used to support the mother-teacher ideal, but the passage exposes flaws in Mary’s character that mitigate this critique. Mary enters teaching expecting to find herself beloved, interested in having her students’ love, but not in earning it. Rather than improving her students’

Parents and Patrons • 139 lives, she expects her students to improve hers, a clear deviation from the mother-teacher ideal. Nor does Mary get the last word. Her speech inspires Aunt Hannah to tell her a story, to offer her “a leaf of [her] life’s experience” so Mary “may distil some balsam from it.”24 Aunt Hannah’s directions for Mary are also directions for the reader, explicitly framing her narrative as an instructional event. Aunt Hannah tells of the trials she faced as a teacher, particularly with one boy who frequently flouted her authority until she reformed him. Years later, Aunt Hannah saves a little boy from drowning on a river boat, only to learn that he is the son of her former pupil, now a college professor. The two reunite, the boy thanks his former teacher for changing his life, and she spends a great deal of time with his family, which brings joy to her waning years. His children come, “like angels,” to “gladden [her] hearth and heart,” which is lucky for Mary, since the boy Aunt Hannah saved from drowning, Frank, now the “child of [her] adoption,” becomes Mary’s fiancé.25 Because of her work as a teacher, Aunt Hannah reaps her reward, spending her last years surrounded by young people who love and reverence her as a mother. Mary learns her lesson, as the reader is meant to, and repents complaining about her work, for though her reward may be delayed, it is also assured. Dispelling one romantic image of the teacher, the schoolmistress with the magic touch, the narrative replaces it with another, the hardworking teacher whose efforts touch eternity. Surely it is significant that Aunt Hannah refers to both Frank and Mary as her children: teaching school has turned this spinster into a mother, granting her access to joys she would otherwise have missed. The narrative nuances the image of the mother-teacher, recognizing the difficulties of the teacher’s task but ultimately presenting them as worth the price. But while this story recuperates the mother-teacher ideal, it also offers a rather different sense of the relationship between school and home and teacher and student than historians have gleaned from other sources. While these sources celebrate the mother-teacher’s power to transform her students, they offer little explanation of the student’s role in the transaction, beyond implying a passive willingness to be remade. Mary Peabody Mann’s description of the student’s role is representative: “A young child should turn to its teacher, as well as to its mother, with the undoubting confidence that there is a wealth of love equal to all occasions.”26 Essentially, the child’s role is to have faith in the teacher, to be open to her influence, but in no way does the child need to earn this love, which should always already exist in the heart of the schoolmistress. By representing this bond as ready-made, Mann erases any

140 • Chapter 4 sense that the love the schoolmistress has for her student is for the student as a unique individual, and, concomitantly, any agency on the part of the child for inspiring this love. That is, while the mother-teacher model seems to place a high value on students, it does so by imagining them in bulk, valuing the social role of student rather than students as individuals who build and sustain unique relationships with their teachers. “The Teacher’s Trial and Reward,” however, prizes reciprocity within the student-teacher relationship. Frank’s father comes to care for Aunt Hannah quite as much as she cares for him. The school blends into the home, as the teacher joins the family, transforming from Miss Hannah to Aunt Hannah. Instead of presenting a (superior) alternative to the family, Aunt Hannah becomes a part of it, cherishing a bond with her former student that extends far beyond the school year. This bond is special: Frank’s father is the only one of her former students with whom Aunt Hannah has such a relationship, and the relationship is predicated on a shared history that only began in the schoolroom. Obliquely, the story demonstrates Beecher and Fuller’s claims that the most significant benefit women would gain from teaching would be independence. Her career offers Aunt Hannah the best of both worlds, self-sufficiency and lifelong bonds with young people who love her like a mother. Teaching isn’t a prelude to motherhood: it’s a substitute for it. Nor are complementary portraits of the mother-teacher like “The Teacher’s Trial and Reward” as common as we might imagine, as even contemporary commentators noticed. In an 1860 article in the Massachusetts Teacher, for example, an anonymous writer lamented the lack of interest American authors had demonstrated in the schoolmistress. The job of the schoolmistress, the writer asserts, creates potential for heroism, a potential it is surprising authors have not capitalized on.27 Instead of celebrating the mother-teacher, as this author recommends, many common school narratives published later in the century present instead a more complex picture of the teacher as parent. This fiction occupies a position between nineteenth-century teachers’ own accounts of their work and the prescriptive writings of reformers, weighing and evaluating, with varying degrees of consciousness, the mother-teacher model. These narratives call into question the simple equation of the school and home, registering the irony of the mother-teacher’s role: she is to take children outside of the home to educate them in domestic values, to act motherly while competing with her students’ mothers, and to serve as a parent while she herself is unwed and childless. Unlike earlier works such as Hale’s, Burton’s, and Irving’s, these texts, published primarily between 1850 and 1880,

Parents and Patrons • 141 consider the effects of a long-familiar prescription for teacher behavior after the feminization of teaching was well underway. They consider the impact of the mother-teacher model from two angles: from the perspective of the fatherly schoolmaster, whose role has been redefined by his implicit exclusion from the model, and from the perspective of the unmotherly schoolmistress, who finds it difficult or undesirable to live up to the vaunted expectations for her conduct. In each of these stories the concept of the mother-teacher moves from a metaphor, representing pedagogical and attitudinal goals for teachers, to a literal reality, as teachers become their students’ primary caretakers and adoptive parents, blurring the boundaries between home and school. Because adoption as we understand it today was still evolving during the period, throughout this chapter I use the term as Carol Singley does in her study of nineteenth-century adoption, to refer to “the care of children by non-biological parents through practices such as placing out, indentured service, foster parenting, and guardianship.”28 In some ways, the idea of the teacher as adoptive parent represents the ultimate fantasy of reformers: it neutralizes home influences, thus giving the teacher great control over shaping the child. But rather than fantasizing about teachers’ unchecked power over their students, these stories present adoption as a double-edged sword, as it eliminates one of the perennial justifications for school failure, the inability to control students’ home environments. This is particularly significant because the students adopted in each of these stories are poor, black, or immigrants, members of the groups that, along with Catholics, were the strongest targets of reformers’ attempts to replace negative home influences with positive school ones.29 School fiction is often tentative about the teacher’s abilities as an adoptive parent, a significant difference from other nineteenth-century fictions about adoption, in which adopted children usually find positive family placements and reform their adoptive parents into kinder individuals.30 When these narratives were written, adoption as we understand it today was an inchoate concept, and one that lent itself well to fiction, as the outpouring of adoption narratives written during the period shows.31 The Massachusetts Adoption Act of 1851, which became a model for other states, marked the early stages of a shift in thinking about adoption that continued over the course of the century, foregrounding the best interests of the child and the emotional bond between adoptive parent and child. The law made it legally possible to create a family by “assuming the responsibility and emotional outlook of a biological parent,” but this understanding of adoption continued to compete with

142 • Chapter 4 earlier models, which stressed the usefulness of adopted children as cheap help.32 Nineteenth-century fictions customarily privilege the new emotional understanding of adoption over the older financial model.33 Fictional adoptions, Singley argues, often show how an orphan finds a new identity through effort and resourcefulness while also calming “fears over instabilities caused by demographic changes” by returning children to the home and family.34 Fictional adoptions thus celebrate both individual opportunity and social stability, which makes them a perfect fit for school narratives, as these are ultimately the twin goals schooling sought to balance. In light of both the popularity of adoption fiction and the alignment of adoption plots with key educational questions, it is unsurprising to find adoptions in school stories, but it is surprising that such adoptions are presented less positively than those in other contemporary narratives. While violence against teachers represents the most negative possible reaction to educators, the acceptance of teachers as fit guardians seems to represent the most positive, but common school narratives are uncertain about the results of such guardianship. Through their portrayals of teachers who falter as adoptive parents, these texts dramatize two negative results of the promotion of the motherteacher ideal: the impediments it imposes on male teachers who wish to act as parents, who garner more suspicion than approbation for their efforts, and the difficulty female teachers face in living up to an impossible ideal, particularly in their relationships with students across lines of difference.

When the Teacher Isn’t a Lover By the 1850s and 1860s, perceptive authors recognized the difficulty of understanding the bonds male teachers forged with their students, particularly with young women, as the parental model grew more strongly associated with female teachers. As we saw in chapter 2, male teachers could hope to establish relationships based on collaboration and consent with their male students, but the gendered rhetoric of school violence largely excluded female students from this dynamic. While male students and teachers could meet as fellow citizens, for female students, schoolmasters are usually presented as potential lovers, or, at the very least, as exemplars of the qualities to be desired in a lover, as chapter 3 details. Though romantic relationships between idealized schoolmasters and schoolgirls were seen as acceptable, authors like Fanny Fern and Caroline Lee Hentz show that understanding all schoolmaster-schoolgirl relationships through this lens distorts them.

Parents and Patrons • 143 In fact, the acceptability of student-teacher romance may be precisely what makes other kinds of student-teacher bonds invisible. Because attraction to one’s students seems almost inevitable in school fiction, a male teacher’s attempt to adopt a female student is likely to be misconstrued as a cover for an illicit sexual relationship, and, as we have seen, school romance is only acceptable when sexuality is deemphasized. This makes adoption essentially an impossibility for schoolmasters, as an attempt to protect a female student instead exposes her to slander. Such is the case in Fanny Fern’s “Shadows and Sunbeams” (1854). Fern tells the story of a schoolmaster who wishes to act as a parent to his student in order to protect her from her avaricious uncle. Because he cannot adopt her, in order to take her into his home he must make her his wife, but this doesn’t represent the true nature of his feelings for her and thus sets their marriage up for disaster. Despite her teacher’s gender, Hetty’s relationship with Mr. Grey is like that shared by a mother and child, but it cannot remain as such because Mr. Grey is a man. Hetty worships her teacher because of his “delicate and womanly appreciation of [her] extreme sensitiveness,” that is, his motherliness. When he proposes marriage, she compares her happiness to that of a little child who wakes sobbing in the night to find himself “still safely pillowed on the dear maternal bosom,” again likening her male teacher to a mother.35 Because their bond is parental rather than romantic, their happiness cannot last. Hetty worries her husband will weary of her because he is so much smarter than she is, and her fears are confirmed when he falls for an accomplished widow. Initially, this makes Hetty miserable, but she realizes her marriage is a mistake and willingly relinquishes her husband’s affections to the other woman, and, when the widow dies, Hetty becomes a mother herself. While the story functions as a critique of the limited options available to women for self-support when their conventional male guardians are absent, it also demonstrates the inadequacy of existing models for understanding the relationship between a schoolmaster and his student. Although the parental relationship that the mother-teacher model idealizes is precisely the kind that these characters share, their genders mean that outsiders will misconstrue their bond. Hetty’s teacher enacts the role of parent better than her uncle, but he is not free to adopt his student, and as such becomes her mediocre husband instead of the protector she needs only temporarily. In Ernest Linwood (1856), Caroline Lee Hentz likewise demonstrates the difficulties of understanding the bond between schoolmaster and schoolgirl. In the absence of her mother, Gabriella is lucky to receive the lifelong care of a

144 • Chapter 4 parental schoolmaster, who always makes her feel like “a child again, in [her] mother’s presence.”36 However, Gabriella’s intensely jealous husband resents him deeply. As is the case with Hetty and Mr. Grey, outside interference complicates Gabriella’s relationship with her teacher. The parental, even motherly, care offered by Mr. Grey and Mr. Regulus demonstrates Fern and Hentz’s awareness that, despite reformers’ insistence that women provided superior parental care inside and outside of the classroom, male teachers could provide such care as well, even in the face of mounting difficulties.37

Bret Harte’s “M’liss” (1860, 1863, 1873) Bret Harte, the son of a teacher and a teacher himself, proves keenly aware of the schoolmaster’s dilemma in his school stories as well.38 In “M’liss,” first published in 1860, then revised and republished in 1863 and 1873, Harte offers a portrait of a male teacher who is successful at parenting his student, though he, like Mr. Grey and Mr. Regulus, faces undue suspicion. Harte’s brief story of a beleaguered schoolmaster and the abandoned and abused schoolgirl who comes under his care quickly became nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. The original version, published in two installments in The Golden Era in December 1860 as “The Work on Red Mountain,” enjoyed such great popularity that the publisher enjoined Harte to expand and republish the narrative. Harte took up the challenge and the extended version was published serially as “The Story of M’liss: An Idyll of Red Mountain” in fall 1863, but Harte gave up after ten chapters, disgusted with the changes. Disappointed with Harte’s decision to quit, at the height of Harte’s popularity in 1873 The Golden Era commissioned R. G. Densmore to complete the expansion, earning Harte’s ire, which did not keep the new 182-page version from running in full. After the story’s serial publication, New York publisher Robert M. DeWitt published it in book form under the ungainly title Mliss. An Idyll of Red Mountain. A Story of California in 1863. By Bret Harte. Harte successfully sued to suppress the sale of this unauthorized expansion not once but twice, but that didn’t prevent the text from having a large circulation.39 Nor did it prevent the story from having a long afterlife. While Harte successfully sued for his right to protect the story as a work of fiction, it was perfectly legally for a playwright to adapt it, and “M’liss” came to Broadway in 1878, with a script owing “at least as much to Densmore’s continuation as it does to Harte’s original story.” The play was popular on the road for decades: throughout the 1880s the play “reigned as one of America’s most cherished

Parents and Patrons • 145 attractions,” and it was produced off-Broadway as recently as 1976.40 Harte himself wrote a dramatic adaptation in 1890, in collaboration with Joseph Hatton, but it was never produced.41 Nor was the play the story’s last incarnation. It was turned into a film twice in 1915, then again in 1922 and 1936, and it was featured on an episode of the television series Fireside Theatre in 1952.42 While the popularity of many of the short magazine stories discussed in Schooling Readers was ephemeral, the same cannot be said of “M’liss.” Its continual revisions and long-term popularity demonstrate the cultural significance of the questions it raises, questions about the proper relationship between a schoolgirl and her teacher. Each version ends somewhat differently: no number of retellings, it seems, could bring this story of a fatherly schoolmaster and his ward to a satisfactory conclusion. “The Work on Red Mountain” and the subsequent revisions dramatize the ways in which achieving the ideal parental characteristics assigned to female teachers could prove problematic for male teachers, simply because many are unwilling to believe a handsome young man can selflessly care for a well-developed female pre-teen. Oddly enough, a male teacher’s decision to act as a father to his pupil proves more problematic than courting her would be. Each revision of “M’liss” further disavows that Mr. Gray is romantically invested in his student, and in each the master faces more and more serious charges of sexual impropriety from the community.43 From the opening of “The Work on Red Mountain” the relationship between Mr. Gray and his ten-year-old student is foregrounded. M’liss, the daughter of an alcoholic, an “incorrigible girl” with a “fierce, ungovernable disposition” and a “lawless character,” arrives at the schoolhouse at night. Her “ragged dress,” “unkempt hair,” and “bleeding feet” ask for the master’s pity while her “black, fearless eyes” command his respect. M’liss confesses that she came at night to avoid the other girls, whom she hates, and because she wishes “to be teached.” She sobs on the master’s desk and he agrees to teach her, with a dawning understanding of the life of vice she is trying to escape. “Thus began a series of little trials and self-sacrifices, in which master and pupil bore an equal part, and which increased the confidence and sympathy between them.”44 Mr. Gray takes up a role endorsed by school reformers, that of imparting the “first lessons of truth” and “earliest moral impressions” to a child whose home has been “made wretched by vice,” and, while M’liss remains untamed, he does succeed to some extent in awakening her better impulses.45 As in Ernest Linwood and “Shadows and Sunbeams,” outsiders prove keenly interested in the characters’ relationship. The community is initially

146 • Chapter 4 divided over Mr. Gray’s efforts: some threaten to remove their children from a school where they are exposed to such base companionship, while others applaud his successes. M’liss’s father’s death completes the transition of the mantle of fatherhood from her negligent biological father to her attentive and affectionate schoolmaster. As a young man, Mr. Gray is unable to take her to live with him because of appearances, so he places her with the Morpher family, a choice that proves unfortunate because their daughter Clytie arouses M’liss’s hatred when she attempts to attract the master. The commingling of student-teacher romance and student-teacher adoption in the same narrative highlights the distance Harte perceives between these two options, a distance the townspeople (and readers) would do well to understand. Mr. Gray’s relationship with Clytie, whose advances he spurns, unfolds in public, at her parents’ home and in the schoolhouse. Everyone knows Clytie is in love with her teacher, and most of the community approves of the match. Mr. Gray’s relationship with M’liss, on the other hand, is controversial, and their meetings always seem to be private, whether they take place in the schoolhouse at night or at one of M’liss’s favorite haunts in the woods. It is parenting, not courting, that must take place alone in the dark, because it is parenting, not courting, of which the community disapproves. Though the contrast between Mr. Gray’s relationship with Clytie and his relationship with M’liss makes clear the distinction in his attitudes toward both girls, the distinction between parent and lover is less clear to M’liss, and it becomes less clear to the reader as the narrative continues. M’liss stops attending school when she thinks Mr. Gray might return Clytie’s romantic interest. Our first indication that their relationship might not be purely parental significantly comes from M’liss, not from the master, whom the narrator takes pains to keep us from seeing as a sexual predator. Mr. Gray finds her in the woods and begs her to return to school. He kisses her on the forehead and, “hand in hand,” they pass “into the open sunlit road.”46 Both of the master’s actions are ambiguous—a kiss on the forehead and hand-holding can be the gestures of a father or of a lover—but the fact that the two walk hand and hand back into town highlights that neither sees any reason for shame in their conduct. Though such actions would be expected were this a scene between a schoolmistress and her student, they disrupt expectations in a scene between a schoolmaster and his student, which is precisely the point. In his analysis of several of Harte’s other short stories, J. David Stevens argues that when men in Harte’s stories are “forced to assume the roles of father and mother, defender and nurturer,” they “find their lives made remarkably more complete,”

Parents and Patrons • 147 an “affirmation not only of the importance of feminine qualities” but also of the “necessity of their expression by males.”47 In the story’s climactic scenes, Mr. Gray plays these roles in succession—first he defends M’liss from others, then he nurtures her sense of self-worth and will to live. Pushed to define his feelings, his identity as M’liss’s caregiver comes to trump all else. Mr. Gray considers leaving town, “fancy[ing] his feeling for the child was foolish, romantic, and unpractical” and noting that in a few years, “by the rules of Red Mountain,” she will be a woman. He reasons that she is nearly grown to convince himself that he has “done his duty” and can thus leave her behind.48 This passage, like that in the woods, cuts both ways— his failure to convince himself that his feelings are not meaningful implies that they are, and does “romantic” here mean sentimental or sexual? The narrator portrays his confusion honestly, and this confusion is only amplified in the final scenes. M’liss gets wind of Mr. Gray’s plan to leave her behind and revenges herself by talking to an actor about joining his troupe. Mr. Gray confronts the actor, identifying himself as M’liss’s guardian. Implicitly defining his own role in M’liss’s life, he remarks that she “has neither father, mother, sister or brother” and asks the actor if he will “give her an equivalent of these.” At precisely the moment when Mr. Gray defines his own role in M’liss’s life—substitute family member—the story calls it back into question. The actor responds, “Want her yourself, do you? That cock won’t fight here, young man!”49 The crudeness of the actor’s language and his attempt to lure M’liss away mark him as a character to discredit, but Mr. Gray’s reaction, starting a scuffle that involves both guns and knives, reveals that he hit a nerve. The violent confrontation also dramatizes the price a schoolmaster must pay for his guardianship over a young girl: Mr. Gray nearly pays with his life. While his gender makes him a fit defender of M’liss’s honor, it is also what draws her honor into question in the first place. Harte implies that only a crude individual with no real knowledge of M’liss and Mr. Gray would construe their relationship as a sexual one, which is why it has not yet dawned on Mr. Gray that anyone might do so. Walking home, Mr. Gray realizes for the first time that “such a construction might be put upon his affection” for M’liss and begins to weary of constantly combating public opinion in order to serve as her substitute parent. The story ends ambiguously, with Mr. Gray angrily casting off not M’liss but public opinion. M’liss threatens to kill herself, and to save her once again, Mr. Gray asks her to leave town with him, moving from defender to nurturer. “[H]and in hand,” as before, “they passed into the road—the narrow road that

148 • Chapter 4 had once brought her weary feet to the master’s door, and which it seemed she should not tread again alone.”50 The narrator, content to end the story with this irrevocable and ambiguous choice, leaves the unanswered question that animates the narrative of what kind of relationship that M’Liss and the master share. Asking this question—one the story explicitly begs— aligns readers with characters like the actor, who place a construction on the relationship that Mr. Gray sees as unjust, and ultimately our prurient curiosity remains unsatisfied. This version of the story shows a dawning recognition of the difficulties faced by schoolmasters as adoptive fathers in terms of allegations of impropriety, but it resolutely refuses to respond to such allegations. Instead, the story privileges the intense relationship between M’liss and Mr. Gray, strong enough at its worst to propel one of them to risk his life in a bar fight and the other to consider suicide but at its best to rescue a girl from a life of vice and teach a young man the value of sacrifice over selfish desires. When Harte returned to the story three years later, producing the ten-chapter “The Story of M’liss: An Idyll of Red Mountain,” the nature of this relationship became a more pressing question. Harte answers it only with difficulty, as he acknowledges in the middle of the narrative, a point when the story is unresolved and seemingly unresolvable. He references “many suggestions” received from both “intimate friends” and “distant readers” begging him to “do the right thing by M’liss” and pauses to “confer with the reader” as to just what that right thing might be. If Harte’s decision to revisit the story highlights its initial popularity, the correspondence he received tells us still more about the intensity with which it is read and with which the questions it raises are debated. Harte was so flummoxed by readers’ desire for a tidy ending, that he decided “to lay aside [his] pen” for a week to “await the suggestions of [his] correspondents.” This break made space in the periodical for “two works which in the quiet simplicity of their home-like pictures and household incidents are attended with none of the difficulties which beset [his] unhappy story.”51 The contrast drawn here between “M’liss” and these simple domestic narratives explains Harte’s difficulty in resolving the story, as no familiar model satisfactorily encapsulates M’liss and Mr. Gray’s relationship and thus no existing plot line would satisfy his readers. The revision still privileges M’liss and Mr. Gray’s relationship and their right to it without criticism but clarifies Mr. Gray’s intentions and softens M’liss’s attraction to him. Gary Scharnhorst, who reads the original version as “nothing less than a study in pedophilia,” remarks that in the revised version,

Parents and Patrons • 149 Harte deletes the “most salacious passages,” “radically revis[ing] the story to obscure the earlier suggestions of sexual impropriety.”52 While I agree that Harte takes pains to clarify Mr. Gray and M’liss’s relationship, these changes are clarifications, not fundamental shifts in the characters’ relations. It’s the need to clarify—the inability of the other characters and, presumably, readers, to imagine M’liss and Mr. Gray’s relationship as nonsexual—that makes the revision such an interesting text. Harte makes a number of changes to elicit readers’ sympathy for the unduly beleaguered schoolmaster. Most significantly, Clytie, not a traveling actor, voices questions about the nature of M’liss and Mr. Gray’s relationship, not out of concern for M’liss but rather because she is trying to ascertain the state of Mr. Gray’s feelings toward her. Shifting the voice of suspicion from a crude actor to a respected young woman highlights the difficulties under which Mr. Gray labors: even respectable people suspect him of impropriety. In fact, Clytie marks herself as a voice of the community when making her accusation. While she begins the conversation with “I sometimes think,” she quickly corrects herself, to “People will talk you know,” progressively disowning the suspicion as her own and highlighting that she is not the only one analyzing Mr. Gray and M’liss’s relationship. In this version, Mr. Gray responds more moderately and more definitively (i.e., without starting a knife fight). All of Mr. Gray’s passion has not disappeared—he still reacts angrily, “roar[ing]” that “[p]eople are d—d fools,” but then corrects himself, remarking coldly that “people are apt to be mistaken” and thus do “infinite injustice to their fellow mortals.”53 That Mr. Gray is immediately able to label this interpretation of his relationship with M’liss as unjust is a significant change from his lack of clarity in the first version. His repeated use of “people” shows that he understands that Clytie speaks for her wrong-headed community, a community from which he soon departs—this time, without M’liss. To remove all doubts about Mr. Gray’s intentions, Harte resurrects M’liss’s mother, long believed to be dead, as a potential love interest for the master. When the two are introduced by a local judge, he remarks that Mr. Gray has been a father to M’liss, reinforcing Mr. Gray’s perspective on the relationship. With the arrival of her mother, Mr. Gray willingly relinquishes his claims to M’liss, refusing even to take the Smiths’ address in San Francisco (where both parties are headed), hoping to avoid Mrs. Smith’s romantic machinations. The story goes so far to disclaim the potential for pedophilia that rather than a predator, Mr. Gray is now Mrs. Smith’s prey. While Mr. Gray comes off a bit colder in this version—he does leave M’liss, knowing he is likely never

150 • Chapter 4 to see her again—he gives over the care of M’liss to her mother, a caregiver socially privileged above himself. In this version, Mr. Gray’s role in transforming M’liss is more limited, but accusations of impropriety are thus more easily silenced. In order to present Mr. Gray and M’liss’s relationship as less objectionable, to make it fit more easily into a parental model, Harte strips it of some of its complexity and depth. The ending is emotionally unsatisfying: unlike in the many nineteenth-century novels in which a reunion with a lost parent is a fantasy realized, M’liss’s new relationship with her mother “seems to awaken none of those emotions in the child’s nature that [Mr. Gray] had confidently looked for.”54 Though M’liss’s reunion with her mother improves her fashion sense and manners, it fails to elicit the expected emotional reaction, a sign that the story still prefers M’liss’s relationship with Mr. Gray to that with her mother. Perhaps because the ending was so emotionally anticlimactic, and certainly because the story was so popular, R. G. Densmore added fifty chapters to Harte’s ten in 1873, at the behest of the publisher. Although this final fictional version is not Harte’s work, the seemingly obsessive desire to keep retelling this story demonstrates the cultural significance of the questions it raises. The short story becomes a novel in Densmore’s attempt to bring it to a satisfying resolution. In this version, both the emotional intensity and the community disapproval of Mr. Gray and M’liss’s relationship are ratcheted up, for the purpose of definitively showing that the two are more sinned against than sinning, that their relationship is innocent. Ultimately, the story clumsily casts off the two models for understanding their relationship that have proven confusingly intertwined—father/daughter and lover/beloved— in favor of a substitute more familiar from domestic models of instruction than institutional ones: brother/sister. Such an understanding is particularly dominant in stories of domestic education that involve adoption or families of choice. Think, for example, of Alice and John Humphreys claiming the title of sister and brother to Ellen Montgomery as they take up her education in The Wide, Wide World and Willie Sullivan’s claiming the title of brother to Gerty Flint as they study together in The Lamplighter. As these examples make clear, this model scarcely precludes romantic interest; however, and, as such, the ending does not really solve the problem of the nature of Mr. Gray and M’liss’s relationship. Densmore’s first step is to redress the sense that Mr. Gray essentially abandoned M’liss at the end of the previous version. Before Mr. Gray even makes it out of town, the carriage driver advises him that “M’liss will need a friend

Parents and Patrons • 151 afore long” and makes a compelling case that Mrs. Smith’s reappearance is highly suspicious, coming at just the moment when M’liss comes into her father’s money.55 His prediction rapidly comes true: M’liss spends weeks hunting for Mr. Gray, and seeking protection from Mrs. Smith, who she doesn’t believe is her mother. When she finally finds him at his office, M’liss is so “overcome by the violence of her emotions as to fall into a condition verging upon hysterics” and Mr. Gray “held her to his heart and kissed her again and again.” M’liss’s behavior toward her former teacher differs from her treatment of other men: “forgetting that she was almost thirteen, forgetting also that she had an antipathy to young men, she allowed herself to be placed upon his knee, and her head to be held against his breast.” Being with Mr. Gray allows M’liss to forget that she is a nearly grown girl and he is a young man: she sees his protectiveness as parental, unlike the attentions of other young men. As such, she wants him to take her in. Mr. Gray is aware of the difficulties this presents and the potential for misconstrual, but he is willing to take the risk. When she asks if she did right by running away, he responds, “Quite right, my child,” reinforcing his fatherly intentions.56 This emotionally wrought reunion highlights the strength of the bond between Mr. Gray and M’liss and his willingness to brave social criticism to protect her, criticism the two face because existing models for understanding student-teacher relationships cannot adequately encapsulate their bond. Reflecting on his feelings with a level of clarity he possessed in neither of Harte’s versions of the story, Mr. Gray realizes that he took M’liss “to his heart” not because she was a girl, but because she was “at war with everybody, an isolated little heart” and he experienced “a strange sympathy for a nature so sensitive and a condition so unhappy.”57 But few others are willing to see his relationship with M’liss in this light, and, as a result, he faces censure and M’liss faces danger. This censure is placed in the mouth of the story’s villain, Mrs. Smith, which both discredits it and makes the willingness of others to believe it all the more damning. In her scheme to get access to M’liss’s fortune, she circulates rumors that Mr. Gray has seduced her daughter. She acquires a lawyer to prosecute the case, offering the scene of their reunion as evidence, and convinces both the local preacher and Mrs. Shaw, in whose home M’liss has been living, of Mr. Gray’s improprieties. The narrator paints the pain this causes Mr. Gray and M’liss dramatically. In an emotional scene in which both characters believe M’liss will need to return to Mrs. Smith’s custody, they rehash their entire relationship. Mr. Gray laments, “And now they want to take you away from me, Lissy. The law is stronger than I.”58 The

152 • Chapter 4 ambiguous “they” places the blame just where the story wishes it, on everyone who cannot see that Mr. Gray and M’liss’s bond should be more important than keeping up appearances, and the reference to the law makes it clear that an instrument meant to protect child welfare is instead being abused in pursuance of greed. To save M’liss from this fate, Mr. Gray considers the course Mr. Grey takes in “Shadows and Sunbeams”—marriage, the only kind of protection the law will allow a young man to offer a young woman. But he cannot marry M’liss because she is still too young. Luckily, the reunion scene proves insufficient evidence of Mrs. Smith’s allegations. Even her own lawyer responds, “Pooh! A child of twelve! And Mr. Gray had been her teacher, her friend, almost her father.”59 Mrs. Smith then arranges for M’liss to be kidnapped and frames Mr. Gray for child abduction, managing to plant doubts even in Regina, Mr. Gray’s love interest. Despite suffering the desertion of nearly everyone he cares about, even after M’liss disappears, Mr. Gray works tirelessly to prove Mrs. Smith is not her real mother. He succeeds in doing so (with the aid of the spirit of M’liss’s dead father—one of the more unique twists Densmore adds to Harte’s narrative). He locates and saves M’liss, triumphantly bringing her back to California, finally vindicates himself and M’liss and exposes Mrs. Smith’s fraud. Only once everyone learns a lesson—the man whom society treats as a criminal who actually saves M’liss from a criminal—do the characters provide the final proof of the nature of their relationship: they marry other people. M’liss gives her blessing to Mr. Gray’s marriage to Regina and she marries Regina’s brother, thus placing Mr. Gray and herself in a legal relation none can alter, brother- and sister-in-law. Mr. Gray’s giving another man permission to marry M’liss highlights his fatherly role even as it transforms their relationship. M’liss realizes that no existing model adequately describes Mr. Gray’s care for her because he has been “father, brother, friend—all a true, brave man could be to a helpless girl,” but ultimately she accepts the language of siblinghood as a close-enough descriptor.60 M’liss’s realization that all existing models fail to capture her relationship with her teacher is ultimately the realization that all three versions of “M’liss,” Fern’s “Shadows and Sunbeams,” and Hentz’s Ernest Linwood push readers toward. While equating the teacher to the mother creates the possibility for women to work as teachers, it also forecloses possibilities for alternative understandings of the student-teacher bond, particularly when the teacher was male. Each of these stories tries to model the school as home and teacher as parent, but in each it unravels, as the metaphor proves insufficient and the relationships exceed its bounds.

Parents and Patrons • 153 M’liss’s description of his care, the intensity of what he endures (slander, legal proceedings, the suspicions of his lover, M’liss’s kidnapping) and the lengths to which he goes to protect her (communing with spirits, traveling cross-country at the behest of the dead) make clear the extent to which Mr. Gray has been wronged by virtually everyone he knows and his heroic willingness to do right by M’liss in spite of this. The story condemns those who prove unable to revise their understanding of what an acceptable relationship between a young man and nearly grown girl might look like to accommodate platonic protectiveness. It seems richly ironic that in a culture in which female teachers were encouraged, indeed, commanded, to enter fully into the lives and hearts of their students, a male teacher who does so is shown as being condemned by his community. This final, unauthorized version of M’liss’s story angrily registers what the earlier versions of the story intimate, namely the high cost of such gendered expectations for relationships, a cost, in this version, nearly measured by a young girl’s life. In the eleventh hour, as a tepid final attempt to offer a new way of understanding such relationships, the story reminds readers that they do have a way of understanding platonic relationships between young men and women, the brother-sister relationship, but it is clear that even this model is not adequate for understanding M’liss and Mr. Gray’s bond, tested, as it has been, in the fire of public opinion.61 Together, “M’liss,” “Shadows and Sunbeams,” and Ernest Linwood demonstrate that the ideal of the mother-teacher and its exclusive application to women meant impoverished possibilities for understanding the relationship between male teachers and their female students. Each seeks to correct this tendency by presenting idealized schoolmasters striving to live up to reformers’ highest ideals—for schoolmistresses. However, in all three narratives, the parental bond, even when extended to the male teacher, proves inadequate to describe the relationship between student and teacher, as these relationships are mediated by the community, unlike those that take place within the home, and thus are freighted with a different set of responsibilities and demands. These narratives challenge the metaphor of school as home by revealing what the metaphor aimed to disguise: that the school is public in ways the home is not. While the male teachers in each narrative face difficulties because of the lack of a cultural model for understanding their bonds with female students, these difficulties come from outside their relationships. M’liss, Hetty, and Gabriella all understand and acknowledge what their teachers mean to them and their teachers do likewise: they only run into difficulties because

154 • Chapter 4 others cannot understand their bonds. Because their relationships begin in the school, they are public and thus are subject to constant surveillance from the community. This is markedly different from the girls’ relationships with their guardians within the home. M’liss’s father is a negligent alcoholic and Hetty’s uncle is a penny-pincher who emotionally abuses her, but it is the teachers who rescue the girls from these situations who are put under the microscope because their relationships unfold in a public space. This surveillance helps to explain the distance between the unsettled resolutions of these narratives and the happy endings typical of sentimental adoption stories. Such stories focus primarily on the development of a satisfying emotional bond between child and adoptive parent, while these stories must justify that bond in the face of criticism. Just as many a literary schoolmaster learns that the schoolhouse belongs to the community by being violently forced from it, the schoolmasters in these narratives learn the same lesson when their personal relationships become matters of public anxiety. The private nature of the home and the public nature of the school, each story shows, lead to different demands on teachers who wish to act as parents than those actual parents face. While the metaphor of the school as home seeks to disguise these differences and thus to mitigate fears about both women’s employment and the school’s interventions into the family, the side effect of this concept, as these stories demonstrate, is a failure to understand the complexities of the student-teacher relationship and the public nature of the public school. Treating the school and home as fundamentally alike rather than as a pair of institutions with permeable boundaries obscures the relationship between the school and the home, the public and the private, the teacher and the parent.

When the Teacher Isn’t a Mother While “M’liss,” “Shadows and Sunbeams,” and Ernest Linwood collectively demonstrates the ability of male teachers to live up to (and exceed) the mother-teacher ideal, some common school narratives offer a more fundamental challenge to the model: rather than de-gendering the ideal, they highlight the inability or unwillingness of women to embody it. These stories also challenge the vision of adoption familiar from sentimental fiction. Rather than reforming their caregivers by inspiring love, faith, and sympathy, as children do in sentimental fiction,62 adopted students instead bring out the limitations of their caretakers, who are unable to properly appreciate them. If a good teacher was, as reformers asserted, a “mother made conscious,” we

Parents and Patrons • 155 would expect to see the mother-teacher in her finest form when turned into a mother herself.63 Instead, however, authors highlight the differences between the school and the home, even while demonstrating the permeability of the boundary between them. Bret Harte himself offered a contribution to this line of thinking in “The Idyl of Red Gulch” (1869), a natural counterpart to “M’liss.” While Mr. Gray is all but a saint, from the moment he introduces Miss Mary, the schoolmistress in “The Idyl of Red Gulch,” Harte emphasizes her pretensions and her fickleness, not her motherliness. Being “possessed of certain rigid notions,” Miss Mary has “perhaps fairly earned the reputation of being ‘stuck up.’”64 Mary stumbles upon a man passed out drunk in the street and admonishes him, but her initial distaste for Sandy does not last because he is so handsome. One of reformers’ rationales for privileging the female teacher was that women, unlike men, could not aspire to worldly success, or, as Horace Mann put it, “schem[e] for future honors.”65 Miss Mary does, however, scheme for a future honor—marriage—and at a class picnic finds herself with Sandy’s head in her lap, forgetting the “purity of spotless skirts, collar, and cuffs” in her attraction to the man who once repulsed her.66 This image of the schoolmistress as more interested in romance than in teaching recurs in Harte’s fiction. In “The New Assistant at Pine Clearing School” (1891), for example, the schoolmistress attempts to be a model of refinement, but, like Mary, she has a taste for disreputable men and gets involved with her assistant, despite the fact that he has been an actor and mountebank. On her last evening in Red Gulch, Mary waits in her schoolhouse, hoping Sandy will appear, but instead she is startled by a visit from the mother of a student, a prostitute whose appearance forms a marked contrast to her own. Mary “coldly” invites her to enter the schoolroom, “half consciously” gathering closer “her own chaste skirts.” Despite these proofs of Mary’s sense of superiority, the student’s mother gushes over her angelic kindness to her son, Tommy. As the scene continues, however, it becomes clear that Tommy’s mother is in fact the better woman of the two. While Tommy’s mother has a (too) keen sense of her failings and limitations, Mary has none. Simply appearing before the schoolmistress, whom she sees as superior to herself, is a sacrifice for Tommy’s mother. This sacrifice is heightened by the purpose of her visit: to give her son to the mistress to raise so he will not be burdened by her infamy. Despite her surpassing love for him, she claims that she “ain’t the proper person to bring him up” and, with tremendous difficulty, falls to her knees before the mistress and avows that “the boy must forget [her],

156 • Chapter 4 sooner or later” so she won’t cry over losing the “bestest, sweetest boy that lives.” Tommy’s mother isn’t simply seeking to slough off her parenting burdens. She believes that Mary will prove the better mother of the two because she has the approval of society. “The worst you can do will be kindness to what he will learn with me,” she ironically claims at the very moment that she demonstrates the quality most prized in the mother-teacher, self-sacrifice.67 Instead of eschewing a sentimental representation of mother love altogether, Harte associates it with a prostitute rather than with the schoolmistress. This fits with the pattern William Dean Howells remarked upon in Harte’s fiction, that “ladies with pasts” are often able to “put their unerring sisters to the blush,” but there’s something particularly cutting about this being true in a comparison to a schoolmistress, a figure heralded by reformers as capable of outmothering mothers in her capacity for self-sacrifice.68 Unsurprisingly, given her vain and fickle character, Mary does not immediately leap at this opportunity to become an adoptive mother. She only changes her mind when Tommy’s mother reveals the secret of his parentage, a secret that does a great deal to compromise Mary’s one lasting pretension, her sexual spotlessness: Sandy is Tommy’s father. Realizing the fate from which Tommy’s mother has unwittingly saved her, Mary embraces her, catching “the sinful woman to her own pure breast for one brief moment” in which she recognizes how much they share, and agrees to take Tommy, not for his own sake, but rather as a final show of her superiority over her profligate lover.69 While Harte does not go so far as to equate schoolteaching and prostitution, he does challenge the idea that schoolmistresses naturally take on the characteristics of the mother-teacher. Mary’s final decision to act as Tommy’s adoptive mother despite her lack of love for him makes her another sort of painted lady, like Tommy’s mother, performing what she does not feel. This ending also marks “The Idyl of Red Gulch” as different from other adoption narratives of the period, in which the loss of an impoverished mother often sets the stage for “felicitous adoption” by a woman who more closely approximates middle-class ideals.70 While Tommy’s adoption does raise his class status, it scarcely seems “felicitous.” Furthermore, adoption in nineteenth-century fiction is usually reserved for girls, as is the case in all the other narratives discussed in this chapter. Claudia Nelson has shown that boys frequently attract the patronage of a benevolent adult, who encourages them to develop self-sufficiency, unlike girls, who are seen as needing support and protection.71 The only other work of fiction I have found in which a male student is aided by his teacher when left

Parents and Patrons • 157 parentless, is the anonymously published Little Bob True . Little Bob True delineates the cultural model available to the schoolmaster wishing to help a pupil: not parentage, but patronage, a kind of protective partnership rather than a bond entailing emotional and financial responsibility. Bob befriends his schoolmaster by leading him to a keener sense of his sacred duties as an educator, and in return Mr. Hallam promises him aid should he need it in the future. When Bob finds himself orphaned and homeless, he remembers he has one true friend and travels hundreds of miles on foot to find him, taking several jobs along the way. When he finally does find his teacher, Mr. Hallam reveals that he has actually known of Bob’s situation for months but chose to allow Bob to remain where he was. “There was a tendency in your home,” Mr. Hallam explains to him, “to make you rely too much upon others” and, to correct this tendency, Mr. Hallam chooses not to intervene until Bob has learned his lesson.72 Even now that he has reclaimed his former scholar, Mr. Hallam doesn’t adopt him. Instead, he invites him to travel west, to attend a school at which he can defray his expenses by working and learn to rely on God and not on his teacher. Rather than a cozy home, Mr. Hallam offers a western adventure, which Bob heartily accepts, in striking contrast to Tommy’s passivity. “The Idyl of Red Gulch” instead unconsciously reflects a fear that would emerge among educators later in the nineteenth century, that female teachers would effeminate male students, as opposed to male teachers, who would develop their self-reliance.73 Though his portrayal of a schoolboy adopted by his schoolmistress is relatively unique, Harte was not the only author to present the schoolmistress in such an unflattering—and unmotherly—light. In order to appreciate more fully the variety of ways this critique was taken up in fiction, I turn my attention at length to two very different texts from the 1870s, Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “The Old Five” (1876) and Edward Everett Hale’s Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars (1878). Woolson is a master regionalist; Hale, a consummate reformer, but, despite their differing literary styles and investments, each crafts a portrait of a schoolmistress who falters as a mother. These stories add a new dimension to the narrative of student-teacher adoption because in each, white teachers find themselves playing the role of parent to social “others,” an immigrant girl in “The Old Five” and a recently escaped slave in Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars. The addition of racial or ethnic difference into the student-teacher relationship fundamentally shifts the ways in which the schoolmistress’ role is imagined. Though the students in both stories are girls, their relationships with their teachers look much more like patronage than parenting. Woolson

158 • Chapter 4 offers a bleak portrait of the schoolmistress’ capacity for mother-love, but Hale takes a different path, imagining a new model for understanding the interactions between a white schoolmistress and her African American ward, privileging mutuality and cooperation.74

Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “The Old Five” (1876) Catharine Wells, the schoolmistress in Woolson’s “The Old Five,” bears a remarkable resemblance to Harte’s Miss Mary, perhaps because Woolson considered Harte a model for her work.75 Unduly prim and pretentious, Catharine has “a very high opinion of herself and her acquirements, fostered and strengthened by conscious superiority over the communities in which she lived.” Like the schoolmasters in narratives of school violence, Catharine is portrayed as an outsider, but unlike these teachers, Catharine never learns to collaborate with those she serves. While “in her own small world, Catharine was as ambitious as Napoleon,” this ambition does not extend to her care for her ward and student, Polly.76 Catharine’s “small world” is transformed by the arrival of Adele Farno, an upper class woman whom she desperately tries to befriend. When Adele is introduced to Polly, so is the reader. Catharine acknowledges that for four years, she has “had charge” of Polly, a remarkably oversized seventeen-year-old Cornish immigrant, but she immediately disclaims the results. Criticizing Polly openly to a stranger, Catharine scarcely approximates the mother-teacher ideal. She continues to complain, lamenting that Polly never cries “like other girls, but just keeps on sighing and sighing,” that she has not learned simple division despite four years’ lessons, and that she hardly knows her right hand from her left. Catharine’s criticisms range from the personal to the academic, and she fails to see that as Polly’s mother-figure, she herself has some responsibility for both. Adele good-naturedly attempts to diffuse Catharine’s complaints, but Catharine will not be conciliated. Instead, she seems miffed: “now you are laughing at me; but I am a teacher, and I like to succeed in my work. Emerson says, you know, that we respect ourselves more if we have succeeded.” Her statement seems ironic—if she wishes to succeed as a teacher, perhaps she should stop humiliating her students, particularly the one for whom she is a mother-figure, in front of strangers. Catharine wishes to succeed only to increase her own self-respect, not for the sake of the students she ostensibly serves, which is why she spends her spare time

Parents and Patrons • 159 memorizing Emerson quotations to show off, even though, as Adele points out, she scarcely understands Emerson’s work.77 Catharine’s distance from the mother-teacher ideal is abundantly clear, but, while she is not a positive character, she is not taken to task for this deviation. Woolson could resolve this situation by having Adele intervene meaningfully on Polly’s behalf, but she chooses not to. Unlike in “M’liss,” in which community members are all too happy to criticize a parental teacher, here Adele hesitates to judge Catharine, and, when she does, Catharine is unmoved and does not consider changing her treatment of Polly. Instead, Catharine gets the last word. Throughout the rest of the story, Adele’s kindness to Polly seems mainly intended to annoy Catharine rather than to ameliorate Polly’s situation. Catharine is not chastised by either the characters or the narrator for her failures as mother-teacher in the way unmotherly schoolmistresses in earlier school fiction, like Mehitabel Holt in The District School, are. Polly’s (and Catharine’s treatment of her) does not succeed in awakening Adele’s sympathies points the direction of criticism away from the characters and towards the ideal. Polly does not receive even the narrator’s sympathies. The language the narrator uses to describe Polly’s hulking body is rather similar to Catharine’s, our first indication that Polly’s class, which throughout the story is associated with her strength and size, is one of the barriers to sympathy at work here. (Adele and Catharine, by contrast, are small and lithe.) The story also emphasizes Polly’s masculinity, repeatedly drawing likenesses between her and male characters, and this quality works against the possibility of sentimental adoption, which, as discussed above, was largely reserved for girls unable to support themselves. Woolson’s story gives the lie to reformers’ assertion that women are naturally disposed to love children, highlighting Catharine’s intellectual and economic motives for teaching school and for choosing to serve (albeit poorly) as a mother-figure for Polly.78 The only praise Catharine offers Polly concerns the work she does for her, reflecting the earlier economic model of adoption rather than the emotional model usually espoused in nineteenth-century fiction. Her adherence to this model strips Catharine of all veneer of heroism: rather than selflessly giving to a student, she reaps the benefits of that student’s labor. That Polly is more servant than daughter, an economic asset rather than an emotional one, becomes still more evident as the story progresses. In a later conversation, Catharine remarks on Polly’s skills in baking and brewing,

160 • Chapter 4 skills that are employed on her teacher’s behalf. Polly’s economic utility to Catharine exposes the school’s connections not simply to the home, but also to the world of work. Historians of education have long debated the extent to which the common school was to serve as a socializing agent for industry, teaching the value of hard work and helping young people develop the ability to follow a schedule.79 Polly’s valuable skills, however, seem innate. While seemingly impervious to book learning (and to any kind of education Catharine can offer her), Polly is quite gifted at money-making tasks. It isn’t the school that prepares her for the world of work: it’s her physical strength and innate docility, both of which are tied back not to her education, but rather to her immigrant status. Into the rural setting of this story, Woolson brings a concern central to urban schooling, the socialization of immigrants, but instead of highlighting the agency of the school in turning the immigrant into a productive worker, she portrays the unreceptiveness of the immigrant to schooling, surprisingly enough, as a positive. Polly becomes a kind of prop, dragged out when Catharine needs help getting home in a rainstorm or carrying her lunch to a picnic. In the story’s final pages, Polly gives Catharine all she has: she dies so that Catharine’s lover, Kenrick, might live. While reformers highlighted the sacrifice women made in becoming schoolteachers, albeit while arguing that women were particularly equipped to make such a sacrifice, here it is Polly, not her mother-teacher, who makes the ultimate sacrifice. She does so to save a lover that Catharine has not dared to acknowledge for much the same reason she dislikes Polly: he is lower class. When he gets caught in a rock slide and buried under a pile of stones, she finally reveals her true feelings, and Polly instantly launches to his aid. She expertly directs Catharine on how to remove the stones, and now, when she needs her help, Catharine seems to recognize Polly’s value, shrieking, “save him! You are so strong.”80 Even when Adele tells her that her actions are likely to cause her to get buried herself, she persists, and, while she succeeds in saving Kenrick, she is fatally injured. As Polly lies dying, Adele finally adopts the sentimental rhetoric we might have expected all along in the story of a schoolmistress and her student: “You have given your life for another, dear; the good Lord will love you for that, and make you very happy in heaven. And we—we will remember you always, Polly; you are better than we are.” Polly’s response, however, reveals not her acceptance of this perspective but rather how deeply Catharine has damaged her self-image. “I never was good at all, Miss Cath knows that,” she replies, then asks Catharine’s forgiveness.81 Her speech reads as ironic—it is

Parents and Patrons • 161 Catharine who should be seeking forgiveness—but the scene is stripped of the pathos it seems to demand. Polly’s death is utterly unreformative. She is martyred to Catharine’s stubbornness, but the story does not end with Catharine learning her lesson. In contrast to sentimental adoption stories in which adoptive parents “rescue the child” and the child “becomes a catalyst for the parents’ spiritual growth,” Polly is killed rather than saved, and Catharine scarcely grows as a result.82 In sentimental fiction, the “desire to adopt the child protagonist stands as one of the most powerful and reliable means of registering an adult character’s integrity and capacity for love,” while not wanting to adopt the heroine is “the outward manifestation of a deeply flawed interior.”83 Catharine, however, is never overtly blamed for her failure to love Polly. Though Polly is large and slow, she is also amiable, thoughtful, and self-sacrificing, but this moves neither Catharine nor Adele to mother her. While narratives of school romance bear a close resemblance to sentimental love stories, narratives of adoption like Woolson’s do not fit the sentimental mold. It is Adele, not Catharine, who offers the only words of affection or consolation to Polly, even as she dies. Catharine does eventually marry Kenrick, but the marriage is an unhappy one, and Adele, who claims she will remember the sacrifice Polly made for love forever, marries for money because “some things” are “better than romance.”84 This ending does not inspire rage or sadness—in many ways, it could not be more different from “M’liss”—but is presented virtually without comment, with an air of inevitability. Rather than representing sympathy and affection as natural and automatic, as did reformers, Woolson presents self-serving behavior, including class climbing, as the predominant impulse of the women in the story. While this is not Polly’s predominant impulse, she is dispensed with to prove a point, not to the characters in the story, but to the readers, correcting a cultural tendency to vastly overestimate women’s affectionate natures and underestimate their ambition, which they must hide. Catharine’s motives for teaching—self-support, class mobility, intellectual interests—mirror those that actuated many nineteenth-century women to enter teaching, but these are the motives the mother-teacher ideal sought to mask, emphasizing instead working for the good of society and of children and denying the possibility that women teachers were stepping out of their private roles. Woolson places her schoolmistress in an extreme situation with her adoptive daughter—the daughter’s sacrificial death— and still she presents Catharine as unable to muster even a fraction of the sympathy and affection that reformers believed a schoolmistress should exude effortlessly.

162 • Chapter 4 The failure of any character to learn from Polly’s death and the reticence of the narrator as to how we are to judge each of these characters in the final scene accords with the non-didactic nature of much of Woolson’s work.85 Victoria Brehm’s assessment that Woolson’s work offers few lessons but loss rings particularly true for this story.86 While Catharine fails as a teacher, the narrator is simply not interested in being one. The story presents a contrast to the mother-teacher ideal that calls the ideal’s premises into question, divesting the schoolmistress of sentimentality and presenting her motives in what the story regards as the cold light of truth. But it rests contented there, having diagnosed a problem without suggesting a solution.

Edward Everett Hale’s Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars (1878) For a reformer like Edward Everett Hale, such a resolution is simply unthinkable. While Woolson was known in her own time as an “outstanding master of the novel and short story forms,”87 Edward Everett Hale’s fiction served the larger aim of his life, the creation of what he called “The New Civilization.”88 By turns a “preacher, lecturer, editor, story-writer, historian, organizer, reformer, chaplain of the Senate, and twenty things besides,” Hale wrote fiction to combine instruction and entertainment, always animated by a serious purpose.89 While Woolson was a conscientious observer, content to present the world as he knew it, Hale insisted on the need to “look forward and not back,” one of the mottoes at the center of both Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars and the book to which it is a sequel, Ten Times One Is Ten (1870). But despite the manifest differences between their works, Woolson and Hale both present challenges to the mother-teacher model. Just as Catharine proves an unfit mother-teacher to Polly in “The Old Five,” so too does Rachel Fredet, the freedmen’s teacher in Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars, fall short of the ideal in her treatment of Tirah, a recently escaped slave who attaches herself to her teacher. Given that freedmen’s education is the novel’s context, it is all the more surprising that Rachel Fredet, the novel’s idealized heroine, is not a particularly motherly schoolmistress. I include this novel about freedmen’s schooling here because doing so helps us to see how the mother-teacher ideal was implicitly racialized, the ways in which racial difference proves a barrier the mother-teacher is unable to cross. Furthermore, Rachel’s school is intended to be a truly common school, one which all children in the surrounding area, black or white, can attend, but no whites will send their children. Freedmen’s schooling was the culmination of the impulses of school reform, the ultimate

Parents and Patrons • 163 test of the ability of the school to transform students and communities.90 Given the strong links between freedmen’s schooling and common schooling, it is unsurprising that the rhetoric of the mother-teacher suffuses discussions of freedmen’s schooling as well.91 Because aid societies sought to “rescue the black home” by “‘purify[ing]’ black womanhood,” it was especially important for freedmen’s schoolmistresses to model motherliness. These women were explicitly tasked with modeling femininity and creating a “proper home life” for their pupils.92 The effusions about the white schoolmistress in this recruitment pamphlet from the American Missionary Association are representative: “Who but she [can] do what needs to be done for the colored woman, — surround with all gentle and persuasive influences, and educate the swarming myriads of children? Who else train and shield and bring forward to a true womanhood the colored girls that crowd our schools, who now have nothing but a cabin for a home, and the temptations of the street to help them to a pure and worthy future? Of all others, it would seem as if this field were prepared and offered to woman’s hand. It is in the line of her special faculty and adaptations.”93 Those wishing to attract young white women to teach southern blacks borrowed the basics of the mother-teacher model—the focus on women’s “special facult[ies],” “gentle” influence, and moral exemplarity—and amplified them, presenting the schoolmistress as not just a force for change in a single community and in the lives of individual students but also as the savior of a race and a nation, bringing not only Christianity but also the cardinal values of northern whiteness to southern blacks. Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars, however, departs significantly from this perspective—a remarkable divergence, considering Hale’s long-term involvement with freedmen’s education and educational issues more broadly.94 Hale was active in shaping the South’s educational future, serving as a member of the Boston Educational Commission, an organization that supported the Port Royal experiment, an attempt to prepare former slaves in the Sea Islands for citizenship through schooling.95 In this capacity, he co-authored a series of articles for the North American Review. The articles serve as a corrective to others’ overly hasty proclamations of total success and as testaments of faith in future improvement, urging readers to take a long view and not to expect transformation immediately. Asking readers to look truthfully at the condition of the recently emancipated, Hale and his coauthor counsel that just as “duty did not free the blacks,” enthusiasm will not educate them and that “slow progress and much disappointment” are to be expected as the conditions of slavery are sloughed off.96 The articles highlight Hale’s sense that a

164 • Chapter 4 thorough understanding of conditions is necessary if one is to ameliorate them, and one of the aims of Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars is to provide such an understanding. Thus, in the opening pages of the novel, Hale reminds readers of his connection to Port Royal, proclaiming that “nothing of importance” that Rachel does in the story has not been done “under similar circumstances by ladies well known to me.”97 The movement for freedmen’s education, the narrator explains, “was one of the most curious in American history, and, for those who will learn, one of the most instructive.”98 The novel sets out to provide such instruction for willing readers. From the early pages of Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars, Hale begins to develop an alternative model for understanding the white schoolmistress’s role in the African American community than that which his contemporaries prescribed. Before we learn of the African Americans’ debts to Rachel, we learn of her debts of them: an orphan herself, Rachel is, in essence, adopted by the community she serves, quickly learning that the “loyal devotion” and service she receives from her students and their families, to whom she is “a thousand times indebted,” compensates greatly for the “indifference or scorn” with which many whites treat her.99 In contrast to those who, like the author of the AMA recruitment pamphlet, view white teachers as saviors to the black race, from the beginning of the novel Hale highlights reciprocity in Rachel’s relationships with the black people she teaches, who provide her with love, care, and a sense of purpose. No character treats Rachel with more devotion and affection than Tirah, a recently escaped slave girl who runs directly from slavery into the schoolhouse, the ultimate symbol of freedom for Hale. When Tirah realizes that the son of her former master is staring at her greedily from across the street, she races into the schoolhouse, taking refuge behind Rachel’s desk. Because she associates the home with slavery and vulnerability and the school with freedom and safety, Tirah must be coaxed to leave the schoolroom and go home with Mrs. Templeman, Rachel’s motherly friend who occasionally assists her in the classroom. While the metaphor of school as home was intended to assuage anxieties about women’s entrance in a public space, this association makes little sense to a former slave. For Tirah, the school is a space of comfort and safety in part because it is public and the home is a site of potential terror and abuse precisely because it is private. Thus, after spending a just single night with Mrs. Templeman, Tirah instinctively decides she prefers Rachel as her guardian. Tirah shows “an obstinate determination to shelter herself under the covert of the mistress’s wing” and to “risk herself nowhere

Parents and Patrons • 165 else.”100 This mention of risk again reveals Tirah’s association of the school with safety and the home with vulnerability, exposing the implicit whiteness of the model of school as home. As Hale avows in his introduction, this adoptive relationship between a white schoolmistress and a black student had real-life counterparts. Such relationships could be benevolent or coercive, offering care to orphans or removing children from parents seen as failing to live up to northern ideals.101 Given Hale’s involvement with the Port Royal experiment, it’s possible that Laura Towne, a career freedmen’s teacher who worked at the school in Port Royal, is one of the “ladies well known to me” he mentions in the introduction. Towne temporarily or permanently adopted multiple students to remove them from dangerous situations. The student in her diary most like Tirah is Miss Puss, whom she adopted in 1870. While under her parents’ care, “Topsy was nothing to her,” but under Towne’s care Miss Puss “is good as gold”—she makes a transition much like Tirah’s under Rachel’s care.102 Though this biographical parallel provides one potential reason for Tirah’s preference, Hale never explains why Mrs. Templeman, the first white person to extend any kindness to Tirah and the most affectionate and motherly woman in the novel, is “at a disadvantage” in her competition with Rachel for Tirah’s affections.103 The explanation that most readily suggests itself is that Rachel’s position is her advantage, that Tirah sees Rachel’s job as a schoolmistress as a sign that she is a safe person to trust. Rachel emerges throughout the novel as a representative white schoolmistress—in his preface, Hale refers to her as an “[i]nvented example” created “by way of encouraging others”—and Tirah’s function as a representative black child goes a long way toward explaining the lack of specificity with which her character is drawn.104 In contrast to escaped slaves in slave narratives, for example, Tirah has no antecedents. She never looks to reunite with or even mentions a family member or her life before she finds Rachel. Other than the single sighting of the son of her former master described above, Hale offers no hints to Tirah’s past because it is enough for readers to know she has been enslaved. Through this lack of specificity, Hale portrays Rachel’s attempts to educate Tirah as representative of the entire freedmen’s education movement. Elevating these characters to the level of representative types places still more weight on their relationship, which does not follow the mother-teacher pattern, despite Tirah’s attachment to Rachel. Rachel provides Tirah with a home and guardianship, but there is no definitive moment in which Rachel adopts Tirah. Instead, Tirah chooses Rachel as her “mistress,” not her mother.

166 • Chapter 4 While Tirah originally seeks to “shelter herself” under Rachel’s wings, her “determination ripened into a disposition to protect her mistress” and a “wild desire to follow her in all her ways.” Given Tirah’s representative status, this description seems to reflect Hale’s image of the duty of freedmen to their teachers—protection and willingness to learn—but it also uncomfortably collapses the distance between schoolmistress and slave mistress, as Tirah gives “twofold the duty of a slave, with all the love and loyalty of a freeman.” Rachel does use this devotion to promote Tirah’s advancement—while Tirah is initially unwilling to embrace the three R’s, she becomes an excellent student simply because Rachel wishes her to be one—but she also permits Tirah to become a servant of sorts. What at first looks like a parental relationship quickly turns into a relationship more like patronage. From the moment of Tirah’s arrival, for Rachel “there was no physical drudgery in life.”105 Reminiscent of the slaves who walked their young masters and mistresses to school, Tirah carries Rachel’s books, umbrella, and mail, keeps lookout for visitors, and runs Rachel’s errands, all without Rachel asking. Tirah serves without being commanded, which gives us a sense of Hale’s limitations in imagining freedom for African Americans. Unlike slaves, however, Tirah is invited inside to learn rather than left standing at the doorstep of the school, a shift the text registers as momentous. Tirah may carry Rachel’s books, but Rachel teaches her to read them. Even so, like Polly, Tirah seems to be more of a servant than a child. Rachel never refers to her as a child or daughter-figure, but jokingly as “my man” or “my woman.” The gender confusion reflected in these labels and the continued comparisons of Tirah to Robinson Crusoe’s Friday evidence the way in which race supersedes gender in Tirah’s story. As discussed above, adoption in nineteenth-century fiction was usually reserved for girls, while patronage relationships were more common for boys. Rachel’s relationship with Tirah more clearly approximates that which was envisioned for white boys than that which was envisioned for white girls. Her race makes Tirah inherently less “adoptable” than sentimentalized white girls because she seems less needy. There is no need, for example, to protect Tirah from the world of work, as she has already been a slave. She also managed to escape from slavery and make it to Rachel’s schoolhouse without assistance, showing a great deal of self-reliance, that quality so prized in the male orphan, like little Bob True. Adoption narratives in other nineteenth-century fiction are rooted in the child’s dependency on the adoptive parent, but Tirah, like Polly, is not dependent on her

Parents and Patrons • 167 teacher. In fact, in both stories, the girls prove significantly more competent at daily tasks than their guardians. Unlike Polly, however, Tirah does get an education, a home, and Rachel’s devotion and respect in the bargain. While Rachel and Tirah’s relationship seems, to modern eyes, an unjustly unequal one, one in which Tirah’s race trumps her status as a child, it is a relationship of mutuality, which makes it very different from the kind of student-teacher relationship the mother-teacher ideal implies. Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars exposes the assumptions and limitations of this model, visible not only to scholars today but, as this text demonstrates, to astute nineteenthcentury commentators as well. Discussions of the mother-teacher focus on women’s natural love of children, capacity for self-sacrifice, and ability to serve as moral exemplars—that is, they focus almost solely on the teacher and her duties and capacities. While a role for the student is implicit in such formulations (the child’s duty is to respond to the teacher’s affection and instruction with affection and obedience), reform writing tends to imagine this relationship from the teacher’s perspective, making the argument that it will be easy for women to love children in the schoolroom because this is their role in the home, rather than that children’s experience will be improved by having female teachers since they are accustomed to being educated by women.106 Hale reconsiders the mother-teacher model by reimagining the role of the child within it, not as a passive recipient of mother-love but rather as an individual with skills and contributions of her own to share. Certainly, Rachel’s limitations in her relationship with Tirah call into question the naturalness of womanly affection and self-sacrifice that the mother-teacher ideal supposes, much as Woolson’s representation of Catharine does, but Hale seems to eschew the mother-teacher model more because it underestimates the responsibilities and capabilities of the student rather than because it overestimates the affection and self-sacrifice of the teacher. Rachel’s failings are likely not intended to be damning, given that the character is meant as an encouraging example for readers. Hale’s painstaking descriptions of Tirah’s efforts on Rachel’s behalf, on the other hand, support the text’s investment in highlighting the role of both blacks and whites in shaping black education, teaching readers that “mutual service is the condition of abundant life.”107 Given Hale’s insistence that mutual cooperation is necessary to support schooling for African Americans, the ways in which the portrayal of Rachel diverges from the mother-teacher model make more sense. Implicitly, the mother-teacher model is a dependency model of education, one that presents

168 • Chapter 4 the student as in particular need of what the teacher has to offer and the teacher as an exemplar to whom the student should defer. In Sitting in Darkness, Peter Schmidt highlights the prevalence of dependency models for black education in post-Reconstruction literature as a means of securing the continuing dependence of African Americans on whites and ensuring that education could not make racial equality a reality.108 Hale thus finds himself in a difficult position: if he presents Tirah as too much of a child, dependent on an adoptive mother-teacher, he risks aligning himself with a dependency model of black education, which does not match his progressive vision. Because Hale does wish to present Rachel as an encouraging example, it is important that she conform in some ways to the culturally prevalent ideal of the motherteacher, but to indulge this too far would be to place his representative African American into the role of dependency and childishness. To present a race commonly stereotyped as childlike positively, Hale cannot present even a child as childlike, which accounts for much of the indefinability of Tirah and Rachel’s relationship. One positive side effect of this indefinability is that Rachel’s authority over Tirah remains limited. Tirah is the one who chooses Rachel as her guardian and follows her to a second home. Though she provides many services for Rachel, she isn’t subservient to her in the way an adopted daughter would be. She does all sorts of strange things in the schoolroom, from sitting on the teacher’s platform to roaming the room whenever she chooses, which mark her as independent. The flipside of the emotional tenuousness of Rachel and Tirah’s bond is that instead of belonging to Rachel, Tirah belongs to herself and exercises what Cindy Weinstein calls “self-ownership,” precisely the independence denied to the slave.109 What at first seems like a parenting relationship becomes instead of relationship of mutual patronage, as Hale rejects the idea of teacherstudent adoption in favor of a vision of cross-racial cooperation. That the future of education for African Americans Hale envisions is one of cooperation rather than dependency becomes clearer later in the story. Rachel is moved to a new post, and Tirah accompanies her, to “carry [her] hand luggage and to confound [her] enemies.”110 However, it is not merely Rachel’s enemies Tirah confounds: it is the enemies of the school Rachel runs. By keeping faithful watch over the schoolhouse at night, she foils an attempt to burn it down, protecting both Rachel and educational opportunity for the entire community. Rachel exhibits protectiveness over Tirah as well. For example, she refuses to permit Tirah to help her care for a family who has

Parents and Patrons • 169 smallpox, fearing she will contract the disease, and, when the local whites finally do succeed in burning down the schoolhouse, she will not let Tirah rush inside to save her books and globes. Rachel and Tirah’s relationship of mutual protectiveness reflects Hale’s broader vision of the relationship between southern blacks and the northern whites who aid them. In the scene after the fire, Rachel makes this clear, proclaiming that the school cannot be burned because it is not a structure, but rather the students and community, the schoolteacher, and the bonds, experiences, and lessons they share. Challenging the slogan of school reformers, the teacher is the school, Hale highlights the inappropriateness of this model for understanding the needs and desires of recently emancipated African Americans. The school is both Rachel and her students and their families, as neither can succeed without the other. Thus, the new schoolhouse is built through a combination of black initiative and white philanthropy, a symbol of mutuality. As the new schoolhouse is in a new location, Rachel must move, allowing Hale to complete the cycle of mutual caretaking. Just as Rachel informally adopts Tirah, so too do the African American minister and his wife informally adopt Rachel, an orphan and a teenager herself, offering her a home when no one else will or can. Both Rachel and Tirah flourish in their new home and schoolhouse and, with some timely aid from sympathetic whites, including several of Rachel’s old friends, they overcome the threat of violence from an angry mob. Tirah becomes, informally, an assistant to Rachel in the classroom, taking on some responsibility for the education of others of her race, a sign of the triumph of education. At the story’s end, which ties back to Ten Times One Is Ten, Rachel and her friends realize that together, they form a group of ten followers of Hale’s four mottoes—but only with the addition of Tirah, whom they invite to join hands with them in a final vision of their mutuality. Rather than as members of a family, on the final pages Tirah and Rachel are presented instead as members of a social movement. This reunion of Rachel and her friends and final endorsement of the principles they share highlights Hale’s vision of the novel’s effects: he encourages readers to form what Janice Koistinen-Harris calls a “reform alliance,” to accept reading as a “moral exercise” that “demands taking actions for reform.”111 This ending also shows that Hale’s reconsideration of the mother-teacher ideal comes from a different direction than Woolson’s. While “The Old Five” ends with Polly’s unreformative death, Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars ends with Tirah’s integration into Rachel’s circle and a lesson for

170 • Chapter 4 readers. The ending highlights the book’s message of inclusion and mutuality, as student and teacher join hands not as parent and child, but rather as co-workers for a brighter racial future.

• In her study of adoption in nineteenth-century literature, Carol Singley remarks that adoption presents “an opportunity—even a laboratory—for the study of cultural and biological differences, including those of class, race, ethnicity, and geography” and challenges readers to “rethink such presumably stable categories as mother, father, child, and family.”112 Defined by reformers as fundamentally like the family, the common school was another such laboratory. When adoption narratives appear in school stories, they offer insight into the authors’ visions of the potentials and limits of education and the applicability of parental models to the schoolroom. Though early common school narratives clearly illustrate the mother-teacher ideal, many later narratives challenge the model by literalizing the metaphor, turning teachers into adoptive parents. Common school narratives expose doubts about the natural motherliness of female teachers, doubts rendered invisible in other historical sources. In Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars, Edward Everett Hale goes so far as to question the desirability of the mother-teacher ideal, even if it were to be attainable. And fictional schoolmasters also challenge the schoolmistress’ claims to superiority, suffering undue censure rather than earning praise for parenting their students. By fictionalizing the mother-teacher ideal, nineteenth-century authors revealed just how aware they were that the ideal was a fiction. Whether they give the lie to reformers’ vaunted image of the schoolmistress or make a case for the schoolmaster’s parental promise, narratives of student-teacher adoption ultimately highlight the way the mother-teacher ideal left nineteenth-century Americans with impoverished possibilities for describing and understanding the complexities of student-teacher relationships. The ideal has impoverished our understanding as well, obscuring from historians the fact that some nineteenth-century Americans were quite as critical of the model as we are today. Rather than as fundamentally similar institutions, common school narratives imagine the school and home as distinct spaces that enable and disable distinct relationships. The boundary between school and home, despite the differences between the two, however, is permeable. Instead of simply competing with or complementing the home,

Parents and Patrons • 171 the common school interacts with the home in far more complex ways, ways dependent on the individual teachers and students who find themselves brought together in both spaces.

Conclusion

While late nineteenth-century authors were de-romanticizing the image of the schoolmistress, their reform-minded contemporaries were taking aim at another sentimentalized part of the common school experience: the one-room school itself. Hoping to remodel rural schools in the image of their urban counterparts, reformers championed consolidation and centralization, seeking to combine one-room schools into larger, age-graded schools and to increase supervision of teachers and school boards.1 Common school reformers succeeded in expanding access to schooling; Progressive reformers sought to expand the meaning of schooling. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Progressives worked to broaden “the program and function of the school to include direct concern for health, vocation, and the quality of family and community life,” to apply insights from new research in psychology and the social sciences to the classroom, and to tailor instruction to the increasing variety of young people attending school.2 Though these changes would take time—not until 1918 did the total number of one-room schools begin to decline—this new reform agenda slowly but surely reshaped discussions of schooling.3 Common school narratives from late in the century reflect these changes in education. The school where Roderick Hume teaches in C. W. Bardeen’s 1878 novel is a graded school, for example, as is the school Jimmie Trescott attends in Stephen Crane’s “Making an Orator” (1899). City schools and teachers begin to appear in fiction after the Civil War, in stories such as Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Cicely’s Christmas” (1871) and “Raspberry Island” (1877). Fiction finally catches up with reality after the turn of the century, as female teachers start to appear with greater frequency.4 In light

Conclusion • 173 of increased interest in child development and psychology, school fictions also become less invested in the experience of teachers and more absorbed in children’s perspectives.5 While interest in school stories does not disappear with the waning of common school reform—indeed, fictional representations of schooling remain plentiful today—changes in the school meant changes in school fiction. But this does not mean people ceased reading common school narratives. Indeed, in 1892, reformers themselves gave these narratives new life, through the publication of The Schoolmaster in Literature, an anthology of school stories. (A second volume, The Schoolmaster in Comedy and Satire, appeared in 1894, a testament to the success of the first.) The Schoolmaster in Literature was produced as part of the teacher reading circle movement, a nationwide attempt to raise teachers’ credentials. Teachers were invited to read common texts, then come together to discuss them. The movement was wildly popular: by 1910, all states but New Hampshire had established reading circles. Educational leaders hoped this course of reading would improve teachers’ knowledge of “pedagogy and professionalism,” provide them with “ethical and moral training,” help them keep abreast of educational trends, and “supplement” their “inadequate pre-service preparation.”6 As Hubert Skinner, the force behind The Schoolmaster in Literature, explained in 1886, teachers were to pursue two lines of reading, studying pedagogical texts alongside works of “general culture,” usually literary texts. Though pedagogical study was of prime importance, general culture was “indispensable” because teachers “must have light and sunshine drawn from outside of the school-room atmosphere.” Because professional reading could be tiring, a “constant reminder of arduous and unremitting duties,” the inclusion of literature in the reading circle program helped leaders to attract and retain teachers’ interest.7 Of course, the ideal subject of discussion would be a text that unites pedagogical study and general culture: enter the common school narrative. Marrying insights into the teaching profession to the joys of fiction, common school narratives met reformers’ twin goals while promising to hold readers’ interest. Even as the one-room school came increasingly under attack, the fictions it inspired acquired additional educational value in the hands of another generation of educational reformers. But the lessons these texts were supposed to teach—and the shape of the texts themselves—shifted in the hands of these educational leaders. In The Schoolmaster in Literature and The Schoolmaster in Comedy and Satire, Skinner and his colleagues remade the common school narrative, attempting to regulate the education it offers readers.

174 • Conclusion Hoping to tap into the cultural cache of common school fiction, Skinner enlisted Edward Eggleston, author of perhaps the most popular common school story, to pen the introduction to the anthology. Eggleston echoes Skinner’s understanding of the importance of reading for teachers, then makes a bold prediction as to the reading circle movement’s potential effects: Perhaps in the Twentieth Century schoolmasters will no longer be accused of having minds rendered dry and uninteresting by unbroken contact with undeveloped intellects, and by a ceaseless repetition of the same instruction. The true antidote to what may be called the teacher’s palsy is a constant acquisition of fresh knowledge or a continual whetting of the mental appetite by means of good literature. [.  .  .] The master whose mind is refreshed by his own delight in literature, whose zest for fresh knowledge remains keen, will do more than all else to render the pathway of the industrious pupil delightsome. If, then, the Teachers’ Reading Circles are to give us circles of reading teachers, hail to that which will do much to deliver us from the dry teacher and from insipid teaching!8 Eggleston’s counterintuitive solution to stultifying nineteenth-century pedagogy? Reading about nineteenth-century pedagogy. The Schoolmaster in Literature both celebrates and repudiates the educational past, drawing readers’ attention to historical representations of teaching while offering a clear teleology of progress. The anthology mingles familiar common school narratives, such as Locke Amsden and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” with Victorian school fiction (Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School-Days; Dickens’s Dombey and Son), European literature (Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre; Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme), and pedagogical texts (Rousseau’s Émile; Pestalozzi’s Leonard and Gertrude). By doing so, the anthology creates the image of an unbroken tradition of Western literature about schooling, culminating, unsurprisingly, in The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Given the narrative of progress that undergirds the anthology, the text works carefully to manage readers’ responses to the fiction it contains. The anthology is animated in equal parts by great faith in the educative power of fiction and great fear about the multifarious ways it instructs. Like unruly schoolchildren, the literary texts collected in the anthology are refashioned to fit reformers’ ideals. Each narrative is excerpted and framed with a brief biography of the author and a few reviews of the text, which carefully point out

Conclusion • 175 the flaws and virtues in the work. The excerpts are supplemented by topics for discussion, again devised with the aim of guiding readers’ interpretations. For example, readers of Rousseau are invited to contemplate both his “wonderful insight into child-nature” and the “absurd theory” that drives Émile. Skinner cautions that while Pestalozzi is an accomplished pedagogical theorist, readers must also recognize that his heroine, Gertrude, “is not a perfect teacher” because she “threatens her children; teaches by the old alphabet method, etc., and is by no means to be regarded as a model to be implicitly followed in our day.”9 And if these enormously influential educational thinkers are not immune to critique, how much more so are the authors of common school fiction. The anthology’s treatment of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a case in point. Though the story is short to begin with, Skinner excerpts it in a way that fundamentally alters the reader’s interpretive possibilities. Although “[n]o name in our literary annals is more fondly cherished than that of Washington Irving,” Skinner feels no qualms about presenting his readers with only the first few pages of the narrative, cutting the story off long before Ichabod Crane’s visit to the Van Tassels and encounter with the Headless Horseman.10 In Skinner’s version, Crane isn’t a superstitious buffoon or an avaricious man pursuing his student for her wealth; instead, he exemplifies the “helpfulness of a teacher’s general acquaintance with his patrons.”11 The choice to remove Crane’s pursuit of Katrina seems telling: while representations of school exhibitions, teachers parenting students, and school violence appear repeatedly through the anthology, student-teacher romance is nowhere to be found, though it is the most frequently recurring plot line in nineteenth-century school fiction. As we have seen, literature from late in the period speaks more explicitly about the potential for student-teacher romance, sometimes with a degree of wariness, and the plot’s invisibility in The Schoolmaster in Literature may serve as evidence of an increasing distaste for such relationships, as least among educational leaders. This omission also demonstrates the need to retool school fictions in order to offer straightforward lessons in pedagogy. The Schoolmaster in Literature is animated by the same faith in the educational power of literature that motivated many nineteenth-century Americans to pick up their pens, but Skinner seeks to tamp down the reader’s interpretive possibilities. For example, the excerpts from Locke Amsden, a book “that is read with real profit,” eliminate all mentions of Mary and focus largely on schoolhouse ventilation.12 The except from The Hoosier Schoolmaster highlights Ralph’s victory in the barring

176 • Conclusion out, but conveniently ends before the townspeople attempt to lynch him. Although it is easy to be critical of Skinner’s willingness to manipulate fictions to his narrow ends, his decision to do so in order to seize their educational potential also speaks to a certain respect for literature and its work in the world, respect for the pedagogical, if not the aesthetic, value of texts. Like Skinner, throughout Schooling Readers I have aimed to take seriously the educational potential of school fiction, reading to understand how these texts construct and instruct their implied readers. By offering a particular vision of what schooling did, could, or should look like, common school narratives worked to shape readers’ understandings of the meanings and purposes of mass education as it was coming into being. Though readers’ responses to short magazine stories published 150 years ago remain tantalizingly out of reach, those responses to common school narratives we do have access to, mostly reviews of novels and articles in periodicals, strongly suggest that nineteenth-century readers were attuned to the common school narrative’s messages about education. However, like Skinner himself, I am deeply aware that teaching through fiction is a fraught enterprise. In each of my extended readings in particular, I have aimed to be attentive to the way fiction can send mixed messages. Again and again in my analyses, I have found myself drawing the same conclusion: teaching through fiction is complicated, as even authors deeply devoted to common schooling, like C. W. Bardeen and Edward Eggleston, have difficulty sustaining their certainty and positivity about schooling over the span of hundreds of pages. But what they leave us with is something far more valuable than unthinking approbation or naysaying ever could be. The way these texts struggle to offer unified visions of the common school speaks not only to the difficulties of teaching through fiction, but also to the difficulties of understanding public schooling. Common school narratives offer portraits of an institution in flux, and they capture the thought process of nineteenth-century Americans attempting to make sense of what mass education would mean in the lives of individuals, communities, and the nation. By doing so, they challenge our historical understanding of the expansion of common schooling. These fictions do not lend themselves to a simple narrative of change over time: narratives from the 1830s bear remarkable likenesses to narratives from the 1880s. Instead, they offer a richly textured image of the common school, allowing us to access a far greater diversity of perspectives than historians have managed to recover from other sources. Rather than presenting common school reform as unquestioningly embraced or unhesitatingly resisted, these stories

Conclusion • 177 dramatize its effects on individuals and communities, reflecting hopes and fears about schooling that didn’t disappear as schooling expanded. Instead of treating the common school as a site of social control, as many reformers did, common school narratives offer us an image of the school as a site out of control, a space of spectacle, violence, romance, bonding, and possibility. Individually, common school narratives offer snapshots of common school life; collectively, they reflect a sustained effort to understand and respond to educational change through literature. Because of their ambiguities and complexity, common school narratives still have an education to offer to readers today. Hubert Skinner was not the last to harness the educative potential of school fiction for teacher education. Far more recently, Rosetta Marantz Cohen and Samuel Scheer published The Work of Teachers in America: A Social History Through Stories (1997, reissued 2012), an anthology filled with excerpts from fiction, memoirs, poetry, and biographies spanning from the early days of American schooling to today. Their work points to one potential use for the common school narrative: these fictions still have the potential to refresh the mind of the teacher-reader just as Skinner and his collaborators hoped they would at the turn of the century, helping teachers become more reflective practitioners, able to situate their work in historical context. While assembling my archive, I was continually struck by the fact that fictions so deeply rooted in the nineteenth-century educational landscape still seem so timely. Assessment, school violence, student-teacher romance, the teacher as parent-substitute: the subjects of my chapters could just as easily be torn from contemporary headlines as from nineteenth-century fiction. This similarity may tempt us to read common school narratives in presentist ways, but resisting this impulse allows us to derive insight from these texts without ignoring their historical roots. Common school narratives offer us not answers to today’s educational problems, but rather productive questions, not simply about what schools do, but about what they mean. Depictions of school exhibitions and spelling bees demand that we reconsider what meaningful knowledge is and how we will know when students have gained it. Narratives of school violence ask us to think about how to make schools both safe and open, how schools can serve the local community and the nation. The school romance and student-teacher adoption invite us to reimagine student-teacher relationships, to reconsider what it means to love one’s students, what it means to love to teach. Through their intelligent observations about school life, these stories invite us to broaden the range of what we consider

178 • Conclusion educational discourse, to diversify the voices and perspectives we value in conversations about schooling. Common school narratives can inspire us to ask new and productive questions, if only, like good nineteenth-century readers, we are willing to be schooled.

Washington Irving

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

1820

The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine National Era Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Port-Folio, Second Series

The Union Magazine of Literature and Art

Western Clearings Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book

The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review The Ladies’ Companion The American Book of Beauty

Georgia Scenes

Saturday Evening Post The Soldier’s Pride and Other Tales

Boston Monthly Magazine Sketches of American Character

The New-England Galaxy

The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon

DATE SOURCE

Catharine Maria Sedgwick 1822 A New-England Tale “Some Account of the Sufferings 8 Jul 1825 of a Country Schoolmaster” 7 Jul 1826 “Confessions of a Country Schoolmaster” “The Village Schoolmistress” Sarah Josepha Hale 1829 and “William Forbes” “The Schoolmaster” John Greenleaf Whittier 5 Jun 1830 “Cousin Lucy and the Village Teacher” James Hall 1833 The District School as It Was Warren Burton 1833 “The Turnout” Augustus Baldwin Longstreet 1835 A New Home—Who’ll Follow? Caroline Kirkland 1839 “Death in the School-Room” Walt Whitman Aug 1841 “Olivia Weston” Caroline Orne Feb 1842 “The Yankee Schoolmaster: A Legend J. K. Paulding 1845 of the City of Hudson” “The Schoolmaster’s Progress” Caroline Kirkland 1846 “Catharine Seaton” Angele Hull Jan 1846 Locke Amsden Daniel Pierce Thompson 1847 “The Shadow and the Light Walt Whitman Jun 1848 of a Young Man’s Soul” Kavanagh Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1849 “Our School Teachers” Jan 1849 “The Teacher’s Trial and Reward” Mary Irving 4 Aug 1853 “Shadows and Sunbeams” Fanny Fern 1854

AUTHOR

TITLE

Appendix: Archive of Common School Narratives

Laura Curtis Bullard Benjamin F. Taylor Mrs. M. E. Robinson

Now-A-Days! “Winter Nights” “The School in Perrin”

1854 1854 25 Feb 1854

Michigan Farmer

Lady’s Home Magazine Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion Flag of Our Union

The Connecticut Common School Journal and Annals of Education Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine

The Southern Literary Messenger

New York Observer and Chronicle Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine The Pioneers of the West: Or, Life in the Woods The Miscellaneous Works of the Late Richard Penn Smith

Forrester’s Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine, and Fireside Companion

January and June Flag of Our Union

DATE SOURCE

“Barring Out” 1 Apr 1854 The English Orphans Mary Jane Holmes 1855 “An Incident in School Life” Uncle Joseph 6 Sep 1855 “Teacher and His Pupil” Horatio Folger Dec 1855 “The Wisconsin Schoolma’am” William Peter Strickland 1856 “The Village School” Richard Penn Smith 1856 Ernest Linwood Caroline Lee Hentz 1856 “Parvus Jacobus, or Footprints Jun 1856 of a Teacher” “Libbie May, The Young School S. H. Elliot 1856 Teacher” “Our District Schoolmaster” Anna MacDonald Mar 1856 “Cousin John” Horatio Alger Apr 1856 Tempest and Sunshine Mary Jane Holmes 1857 Meadow Brook Mary Jane Holmes 1857 “Standing Up with the Schoolmaster” Helen L. Bostwick Jun 1857 “A Country School Teacher” Jul 1857 Mary W. Janvrin 24 Oct 1857 “My Summer at Pine Hill” “Our Hasty Union” Clara Augusta 7 Nov 1857 Little Bob True 1858 Our Nig Harriet Wilson 1859 “Mary Morris and Her Pupils” 14 May 1859

AUTHOR

TITLE

180 • Appendix

“The Work on Red Mountain” Bret Harte 1860 Elsie Venner Oliver Wendell Holmes 1861 “My Success as a Match-Maker” Mrs. Josie Signor Lovering 12 Jan 1861 “Marion Clyde” Willie Ware 13 Jul 1861 The Morgesons Elizabeth Stoddard 1862 “My Brother’s Wife” Belle Rutledge Aug 1862 “The Story of M’liss: An Idyll of Bret Harte Fall 1863 Red Mountain” The Old Log Schoolhouse Alexander Clark 1864 “A Letter from Zekiel Stebbins” Zekiel Stebbins May 1864 “That Wicked Little Moustache” Mrs. Jane G. Austin May 1864 “A Spelling School” 11 May 1865 “The Miseries of a Country School Feb 1865 Teacher: Or, Tom Archer’s Education” “A Romance in Real Life” Dora E. Butler Jan 1865 “Experience of a Country Hezekiah Butterworth May 1866 School-teacher” “The District School” Thomas Lackland 1867 Kate Putnam 11 Apr 1868 “Our New Teacher” 5 Sep 1868 “In a Hoop Skirt” S G C Oct 1868 “Whipped into Love” Frances Harper 1869 Minnie’s Sacrifice “The Idyl of Red Gulch” Bret Harte Dec 1869 Richard Malcolm Johnston 1870 “The Goosepond School” Richard Malcolm Johnston 1870 “Old Friends and New” Lucius Goss 27 Jan 1870 “A Ghost Story” “Adam Ben Thorn’s Search for a School Revilo Jul 1870 Education” Homespun; Or, Five And Twenty Years Ago Flag of Our Union Flag of Our Union Ballou’s Monthly Magazine The Christian Recorder Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine The Dukesborough Tales The Dukesborough Tales The Youth’s Companion Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education

Dollar Monthly Magazine Ballou’s Monthly Magazine

American Educational Monthly Dollar Monthly Magazine The Youth’s Companion Dollar Monthly Magazine

Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine Golden Era



Golden Era The Atlantic Monthly (as “The Professor’s Story,” 1860) Flag of Our Union Flag of Our Union

Archive of Common School Narratives • 181

AUTHOR

DATE SOURCE

“Cross-Purposes” Frank Lee Benedict Oct 1871 Peterson’s Magazine Edward Eggleston 1871 Hearth and Home The Hoosier Schoolmaster Edward Eggleston Mar 1871 Scribner’s Monthly “Some Western Schoolmasters” “Florence Knowlton’s Fortune” Clara Augusta Sep 1871 Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine Annie Cary 1 Jul 1871 Maine Farmer “A Story for Boys” “Pete” Apr 1871 Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine “Cicely’s Christmas” Constance Fenimore Woolson 30 Dec 1871 Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art “Patty Dree, Schoolmarm” Mrs. James Neall Jun 1872 Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine Mliss. An Idyll of Red Mountain. A Story R. G. Densmore and Bret Harte 1873 Golden Era of California in 1863. By Bret Harte “Mary Lee’s Dream” Laura Oakwood Sep 1873 The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health “A Flower of the Snow” Constance Fenimore Woolson Jan 1874 The Galaxy “The Waldenburg Road” Constance Fenimore Woolson 4 Jul 1874 Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art “Two Country School-Masters on Nov 1874 The American Educational Monthly their Travels” Hoosier Mosaics Maurice Thompson 1875 “Ralph Wallingford’s Affinity” Susan B. Long Oct 1875 Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine “Waiting Upon Sue” Shirley Penn Dec 1875 Oliver Optic’s Magazine “Chubby’s Spellin’ Match” Jennie Eggleston Zimmerman 30 Jun 1875 Christian Union The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain 1876 “The School Teacher at Bottle Flat” Feb 1876 Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly “The Old Five” Constance Fenimore Woolson Nov 1876 Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art Horatio Alger 1877 The New Schoolma’am; or, A Summer in North Sparta “My School at Pinhook” Milton T. Adkins Mar 1877 Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine “Raspberry Island” Constance Fenimore Woolson Jun/Nov 1877 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine “Barred In” Live Saxon Sep 1877 St. Nicholas, an Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks

TITLE

182 • Appendix

Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars Edward Everett Hale 1878 “King David” Constance Fenimore Woolson 1878 “Catching the Schoolmaster” 1878 Roderick Hume C. W. Bardeen 1878 “A Queer Courtship” 5 Jan 1878 Commissioner Hume C. W. Bardeen 1879 “The Prize of Upper Nineveh” Eliot McCormick 5 Apr 1879 “Light After Darkness” Jul 1879 Bricks Without Straw Albion W. Tourgée 1880 Aikenside Mary Jane Holmes 1880? “Diamonds” Mary Jane Holmes 1881 Cape Cod Folks Sally McLean Greene 1881 “Turning a Teacher Out of School” 24 Nov 1881 The Schoolmaster’s Trial A. Perry 1881 “The Schoolmaster’s Dream” Clay Corderi 4 Feb 1882 O. A. Bierstadt Aug 1882 “The Two Suitors” “The Jolly Rangers” Emily Huntington Miller 9 Nov 1882 The Hoosier Schoolboy Edward Eggleston 1883 “Our Teacher” James L. Bowen Jun 1883 Jul/Aug 1883 “Putting in the Summer Professionally” D. S. Richardson The Story of a Country Town E. W. Howe 1883 “A Pedagogue Primeval” C. T. H. Palmer Apr 1884 Margaret Blanc 1884 “Monte Dick” Theron Brown 1884 The Red Shanty Boys “Shasta Lilies” Charles Howard Shinn 1885 “Honesty in School” M. Ruth 21 May 1885 “Our School Exhibition” L. Harbour 24 Sep 1885 Louise Coffin Jones Sep 1885 “A Hoosier Idyl” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine Christian Advocate The Youth’s Companion Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science

Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine

Ballou’s Monthly Magazine Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine

Saturday Evening Post Ballou’s Monthly Magazine Christian Union

The Youth’s Companion

Maggie Lee!

Rodman the Keeper The Youth’s Companion The School Bulletin Maine Farmer The School Bulletin Christian Union Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly

Archive of Common School Narratives • 183

B. P. Wall

“Terecita”

Mr. Tangier’s Vacations Edward Everett Hale “Miss Grey” “The Young Charcoal-Burner’s Sister” Edward A. Rand Charles Hoyt A Midnight Bell Cressy Bret Harte The Log Schoolhouse on the Columbia Hezekiah Butterworth “The New Assistant at Pine Clearing Bret Harte School” Sarah Orne Jewett “A Native of Winby” “The Pupil of Chestnut Ridge” Bret Harte “Making an Orator” Stephen Crane

AUTHOR

TITLE Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine

1893 1896 1899

A Native of Winby, and Other Tales Trent’s Trust Whilomville Stories

1888 Feb 1888 Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 11 Oct 1888 Christian Union 1889 1889 1890 1891 Colonel Starbottle’s Client

Apr 1886

DATE SOURCE

184 • Appendix

Notes

Introduction 1. Robert W. Johanssen, “Literature and History: The Early Novels of Edward Eggleston,” Indiana Magazine of History 48 (1952): 37, 40. 2. James A. Rawley, “Edward Eggleston: Historian,” Indiana Magazine of History 40 (1944): 343. 3. James Maguire, American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds: The Lives of Five Top Spellers As They Compete for Glory and Fame (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006), 59. 4. Rawley, “Edward Eggleston: Historian,” 341. 5. Horace Mann, “Report for 1848,” in Annual Reports on Education (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1872), 708. 6. John L. Rury, Educational and Social Change: Themes in the History of American Schooling (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2009), 80. 7. For more on British school stories, see Clark, Gargano, Holt, Musgrave, Sims and Clare, Tribunella, and Vaninskaya. For more on other fictional representations of schooling, see Barreca and Morse, Bauer, Carpan, Cole, Dalton, Delony and Delony, Fisher et al., Foff, Joseph and Burnaford, Keroes, Maher, Perrin, Shockley, Weaver, Weber and Mitchell, and Zimmerman. 8. Sarah Robbins, Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 2–3. 9. Beverly Lyon Clark, Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys (New York: Garland, 1996), 7. 10. “The Popular School and the Teacher in English Literature,” The American Journal of Education 3, no. 8 (1857): 155. 11. “Literary Notices,” The New-York Mirror: a Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts, July 27, 1833, 26.

186 • Notes to Pages 5–7 12. “Ventilation Essential to Health,” Christian Register, December 9, 1848, 100. 13. Edward Eggleston, introduction to The Schoolmaster in Literature, ed. Hubert M. Skinner (New York: American Book Company, 1892), 6. 14. María Carla Sánchez, Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 4–5. 15. Lawrence Cremin, American Education, the National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 136. 16. Eggleston, introduction, 5. 17. Among others, see the following reviews, listed in the bibliography: “Article XII: A New-England Tale,” “A New-England Tale,” “Review of Publications: A New-England Tale,” “Article V- The District School as It Was,” “Common Schools,” “The District School,” “Literary Notices,” “Literary Notices: Book Table,” “Article 3,” “Critical Notices,” and “A Book Sweet in the Mouth: And Sweet in the Belly.” 18. Perhaps their diversity is one factor that has prevented common school narratives from garnering critical attention, despite the fact that modern representations of schools and nineteenth-century British school stories have been studied extensively. For more on British school stories, see Clark, Gargano, Holt, Musgrave, Sims and Clare, Tribunella, and Vaninskaya. For more on other fictional representations of schooling, see Barreca and Morse, Bauer, Carpan, Cole, Dalton, Delony and Delony, Fisher et al., Foff, Joseph and Burnaford, Keroes, Maher, Perrin, Shockley, Weaver, Weber and Mitchell, and Zimmerman. 19. Maxine Greene, The Public School and the Private Vision: A Search for America in Education and Literature (New York: Random House, 1965), 4–5. 20. David Cohen, who considers the work of Twain, Cooper, Thoreau, and Eggleston, draws a sharp dichotomy between “sunny boosters” and “gloomy haters of school,” a dichotomy that proves insupportable when reviewing a larger body of fiction (404). Jonathan Zimmerman’s Small Wonder offers a long historical view on representations of the “little red schoolhouse,” dipping into nineteenth-century literature. But his claim that antebellum representations of schooling are spiteful and critical while postbellum representations are nostalgic and sentimental does not hold up when one considers a broader group of fictions. 21. In order to appreciate how literary texts entered a widespread conversation about education, I read them within their historical context, alongside the writings of common school reformers and articles from education journals, using these primary sources to supplement the work of historians of education. Throughout Schooling Readers, I draw cautiously and advisedly on this work seeking both to build on and to shift our existing understanding of mass education in the nineteenth century. I rely on histories to provide a sense of the investments, goals, and tactics of school reformers, as it is often the writings of reformers on which these histories rest, but I approach claims about Americans’ responses to their activities with caution, particularly when

Notes to Pages 7–10 • 187 they conflict with the patterns I see emerging in fiction. In each chapter, I draw on a large number of nonfictional primary texts to test and to buttress claims I draw from histories of education. 22. Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, Hill and Wang, 1983), 62. 23. Ibid., 4. 24. Ibid., 13–22. 25. Jurgen Herbst, And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization in American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 23. 26. Kaestle, Pillars, xi. 27. Ibid., 172. 28. Cremin, American Education, 11. 29. Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France, and the USA (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 171. 30. B. Edward McClellan, Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 22. 31. Marianne A. Larsen, The Making and Shaping of the Victorian Teacher: A Comparative New Cultural History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 85. 32. Kaestle, Pillars, 100. 33. Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 124. 34. Gerald Grant and Christine E. Murray, Teaching in America: The Slow Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 85. 35. Rush Welter, American Writings on Popular Education: The Nineteenth Century (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), xx–xxi. 36. Jessica Enoch, “A Woman’s Place is in the School: Rhetorics of Gendered Space in Nineteenth-Century America,” College English 70, no. 3 (2008): 284. 37. This summary follows Kaestle’s account in Pillars, particularly 95–136. 38. Grant and Murray, Teaching in America, 85–86. 39. Milton Gaither explains this requirement further in Homeschool. Many historians have debated why common schooling did not take hold in the South, generally citing the myriad cultural differences between the South and the rest of the nation before the Civil War. Holmes and Weiss detail several reasons why schools were less popular in the South. Population was more dispersed than in the North and Midwest, making community schooling more difficult. Early in the nineteenth century, private seminaries for boys and for girls became popular in both the North and the South, but they persisted longer in the South. Publicly funded schooling in the South carried the stigma of poverty, as wealthy families relied on private tutors. By the 1850s, Cremin argues, public education also carried the taint of “northernness.” 40. Kaestle, Pillars, 219.

188 • Notes to Pages 10–15 41. See Stuart A. Rosenfeld and Jonathan P. Sher, “The Urbanization of Rural Schools, 1840–1970,” in Education in Rural America: A Reassessment of Conventional Wisdom, ed. Jonathan P. Sher (Boulder, Westfield Press, 1977); and Reese, America’s Public Schools. 42. Rosenfeld and Sher, “The Urbanization of Rural Schools,” 17. 43. David Nasaw, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 81. 44. Rury, Education and Social Change, 69. 45. Kaestle, Pillars, 95. 46. Cremin, American Education, 175. 47. Kaestle, Pillars, 136. 48. Ibid., 160–61. 49. I located these narratives in a number of ways. Digitized archives of periodicals, like the American Periodicals Series Online (ProQuest) and Google Books, were tremendously useful for finding a large number of long-forgotten titles. Despite the breadth of my archive; however, it isn’t exhaustive because of the sheer number of school narratives produced during the nineteenth century as well as the limits of what has been digitized. Instead of reaching for the impossible dream of complete coverage, I instead assembled a large group of narratives, drawn from a variety of periodicals, aimed at a variety of audiences, and published across a significant period of time. 50. Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), ix. 51. John W. Tebbel and Mary E. Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 57. 52. Accounts of common schooling history routinely separate their discussions or urban and rural schooling, as these two systems evolved very differently. Most of the urban school stories I have located were written by Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the contrast between these narratives and “The Old Five,” one of Woolson’s other short stories, which features a rural school teacher, demonstrates how differently these kinds of schools were imagined. In Woolson’s urban school stories, which include “Cicely’s Christmas” (1871), “The Waldenburg Road” (1874), and “Raspberry Island” (1877), city school teachers are exhausted and underpaid, victims of an oppressive system deserving of the reader’s (condescending) sympathy. Woolson bemoans the plight of the city teacher, but the rural teacher in “The Old Five” (1876) is an object of scorn, not pity. While Woolson’s urban teachers are not paid what they are worth, her rural teacher is worthless, pretentious, and fickle, as discussed in chapter 4. 53. See Selcer and Tebbel and Zuckerman. 54. Tebbel and Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 14, 62. 55. Quoted in Frank L. Mott, A History of American Magazines: 1850–1865 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 263.

Notes to Pages 15–22 • 189 56. Paulette D. Kilmer, “Youth’s Companion,” in Encyclopedia of American Journalism, ed. Stephen Vaughn (New York, Routledge, 2008), 610. 57. Mott, American Magazines, 268; John W. Tebbel, The American Magazine: A Compact History (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969), 104. 58. Tebbel, The American Magazine, 105. 59. Richard F. Selcer, Civil War America, 1850 to 1875 (New York: Facts on File, 2006), 428. 60. Lori Merish, “Story Papers,” in US Popular Print Culture, 1860–1920, ed. Christine Bold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45–48. 61. Stephen J. Mexal, Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 13, 18, x. 62. Michael Lund, America’s Continuing Story: An Introduction to Serial Fiction, 1850–1900 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 53.

Chapter 1 1. Denouncing Mr. Dobbins’s sadism is a favorite pastime of scholars of the novel, but within the context of the common school narrative, his punishments are downright mundane, as we shall see in chapter 2. See Messent, Perrin, and Hutchinson for representative critical responses to Mr. Dobbins. 2. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Ann Arbor: Borders Classics, 2006), 113–14. Many critics, including Seelye, Peck, Hendler, and Cox, have pointed out both Tom’s theatricality and the novel’s theatricality as a whole. But here, both Tom and Twain forsake a theatrical opportunity. 3. Ibid., 114–15. 4. Twain’s chapter highlights the investment of such scenes in literary questions as well as educational ones. The chapter includes a footnote explaining that the compositions Twain lampoons were taken “without alteration” from a “volume entitled ‘Prose and Poetry, by a Western Lady’” (118). The compositions are actually lifted from Mary Ann Harris Gay’s The Pastor’s Story and Other Pieces; or Prose and Poetry. What starts out as a critique of the people of St. Petersburg and their willingness to applaud schoolgirl drivel turns into a critique of a segment of the American reading public: Gay’s popular text went through seven editions between 1858 and 1871 (Hill, “Composition and Structure,” 70). 5. Mann, “Report for 1848,” 669. 6. Carl Kaestle, Lawrence Cremin, William Reese, and Michael Katz consider both of these goals, but they come to somewhat different conclusions. Kaestle emphasizes reformers’ investment in social stability, while Katz takes this further and views schooling as a way in which inequality was justified. Cremin and Reese spend more time considering the importance of schooling in providing equality of opportunity, a justification for mass education that dates back to the Founding Fathers.

190 • Notes to Pages 22–28 7. Barbara Finkelstein, Governing the Young: Teacher Behavior in Popular Primary Schools in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New York: Falmer Press, 1989), 12. 8. Wayne E. Fuller, “The Teacher in the Country School,” in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, ed. Donald R. Warren (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 113–14. 9. Rury, Education and Social Change, 71–72. 10. Lindal Buchanon, Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 50. 11. William J. Reese, Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 20. 12. See, for example, “Common School Examination,” “A School Examination: Its Interest, Intrinsic and Incidental,” “School Exhibition,” “The Colored School Exhibition,” and “Preparing for an Examination.” 13. “School Examinations and Exhibitions,” The Connecticut Common School Journal and Annals of Education, May 1857, 152. 14. “Examination of Schools,” The District School Journal of the State of New York, August 1, 1841, 14. 15. Nemo, “Examination of Schools,” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, May 1863, 149. 16. “School Examinations and Exhibitions,” 152. 17. “School Examinations,” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, September 1852, 255–56. 18. See Hogan and N. Green. 19. David P. Page, Theory and Practice of Teaching (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 29. 20. David Hogan, “Modes of Discipline: Affective Individualism and Pedagogical Reform in New England, 1820–1850,” American Journal of Education 99, no. 1 (1990): 22. 21. X.Y.Z., “Some Views in Regard to Exhibitions and Examinations,” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, January 1864, 7–8. 22. Reese, Testing Wars, 5. 23. Reese, Testing Wars, 4–5. 24. Mary Kelley, “Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867),” Legacy 6, no. 2 (1989): 46. 25. Emily Van Dette, “‘It Should Be a Family Thing’: Family, Nation, and Republicanism in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale and The Linwoods,” American Transcendental Quarterly 19, no. 1 (2005): 52. 26. “A New-England Tale,” Christian Register, June 7, 1822, 170. 27. Lucinda L. Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements, Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), xxv. 28. Sarah Robbins, “‘The Future Good and Great of Our Land’: Republican Mothers, Female Authors, and Domesticated Literacy in Antebellum New England,” New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters 75, no. 4 (2002): 2–3.

Notes to Pages 28–32 • 191 29. Robbins, Managing Literacy, 74. 30. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, A New-England Tale; Or, Sketches of New-England Character and Manners (New York: E. Bliss & E. White, 1822), 74. 31. The school is a subscription school, a kind of school common before significant public funding for education became available, for which each child was to pay a nominal amount. Such schools rarely appear in New England literature later in the period, but virtually all the non-exclusive schools in southern fiction are subscription schools. Compared to elite private schools, the fees for subscription schools were low and thus the students represented a mix of social classes. Even in the Northeast, school reformers did not fully succeed in abolishing rate bills, which required parents to pay fees for each child sent to school, until the 1860s. Common schooling did not always mean free schooling until the 1870s or later (Kaestle, Pillars, 117). 32. Sedgwick, A New-England Tale, 78–79. 33. Ibid., 80, 82. 34. Ibid., 82. 35. Ibid., 83–84. 36. Ibid., 86–87. 37. Sedgwick’s novel shares marked commonalities with a later school story, Mary Jane Holmes’s “Bad Spelling” (1859). Like Sedgwick’s novel, the story focuses on a pair of cousins, haughty and wealthy Arabella and poor and orphaned Mildred. Like Elvira, Arabella performs her prize-winning composition to great applause, only to have a member of the audience recognize her work as plagiarized from a newspaper. This dampens the ardor of her lover, George Clayton, while increasing his estimation of Mildred, the rightful winner of the prize. Mildred takes the school’s top honors and is rewarded with marriage to Clayton, while Arabella’s family, much like the Wilsons, suffers moral and financial bankruptcy. In both stories, hard-working and virtuous young women are rewarded with marriage to wealthy men, but their marriages return them to their original class positions. 38. Warren Burton, The District School as It Was (Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 2010), iv. Although historians frequently refer to it as a memoir (an understandable confusion, given its subtitle, “By one who went to it”), The District School is a work of fiction. Burton was actually home-schooled by his grandparents before attending Harvard. See Cohen and Scheer, The Work of Teachers in America. 39. Ibid., iv. 40. “Common Schools,” The Family Lyceum, August 3, 1833, 203. 41. “Literary Notices,” New-York Mirror, 26. See also the reviews from the American Annals of Education, The Family Lyceum, The Literary Journal, New-England Magazine, and The Pearl and Literary Gazette. 42. Burton, District School, 84, 92. 43. Ibid., 87–88. 44. Ibid., 93–95.

192 • Notes to Pages 33–39 45. Ibid., 98–100. 46. Ibid., 102–4. 47. Burton includes a school examination later in the book, distinguishing between exhibitions and examinations just as other reformers did, to reinforce his critique of show versus substance. In contrast to the exhibition, very few people attend the examination, though it provides a better assessment of the children’s progress, and even the narrator must acknowledge that the chapter is dull (195). 48. Ibid., 105. 49. “Critical Notices,” Broadway Journal, November 29, 1845, 320. 50. For discussions of Kirkland’s teaching career, see Osborne, Langston, and Bouma. Bouma makes the case that although Kirkland’s writing was admired, at the time of her death she was valued most highly as an “influential and devoted educator” (229). 51. Caroline M. Kirkland, “The Schoolmaster’s Progress,” in Western Clearings (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 157. This penchant for presenting schoolmasters as physically freakish fades away over the course of the century, as we will see in chapter 3, as schoolmasters increasingly become objects of female desire. “The Schoolmaster’s Progress” is an interesting turning point in this tradition, because Master Horner is physically awkward but still an object of romantic interest. 52. Ibid., 155. 53. In addition to highlighting the ignorance of school committees, the teacher examination is also frequently used to demonstrate the way local politics adversely affect hiring, as is the case in William Peter Strickland’s “The Wisconsin Schoolma’am” (1856) and Charles Howard Shinn’s “Shasta Lilies” (1885). 54. Kirkland, “The Schoolmaster’s Progress,” 157–59. 55. Ibid., 161. 56. Ibid., 167. 57. Denise K. Jacobs, “East Meets Midwest in Caroline Kirkland’s Western Clearings,” Midamerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature 28 (2001): 92. 58. Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster, discussed at length in chapter 2, shares marked similarities with “The Schoolmaster’s Progress.” Like Kirkland’s story, the novel features a spelling bee at which the schoolmaster falls in love with a local girl, who is contrasted to another young woman with eastern airs. Ralph Hartsook is just as flummoxed by Hannah’s spelling success as Master Horner is by Ellen’s, and in both another woman unsuccessfully tries to spoil their love story. 59. Richard Malcolm Johnston, “Old Friends and New,” in Dukesborough Tales: The Chronicles of Mr. Bill Williams (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1892), 186–88. 60. Ibid., 187. 61. Ibid., 178.

Notes to Pages 40–49 • 193 62. Daniel Pierce Thompson, Locke Amsden, Or, the Schoolmaster: A Tale (Boston: B. B. Mussey, 1970), 124. 63. Mary Jane Holmes, Meadow Brook (New York: Miller, Orton, 1970), 101. 64. L. Harbour, “Our School Exhibition,” The Youth’s Companion, September 24, 1885, 374. 65. Mrs. M.E. Robinson, “The School in Perrin:—Or,—The New Teacher,” Flag of Our Union, February 25, 1854, 60. 66. “The Examination,” The Youth’s Companion, August 29, 1828, 55. 67. S. H. Elliot, “Libbie May, The Young School Teacher,” The Connecticut Common School Journal and Annals of Education, July 1865, 206. 68. Eliot McCormick, “The Prize of Upper Nineveh: A Story,” Christian Union, May 8, 1878, 394. 69. Ibid., 394. 70. Ibid., 394. 71. Reese, Testing Wars, 192. 72. Charles Hale Hoyt, A Midnight Bell, Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections (ProQuest), 77. 73. “Pete,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 6, no. 4 (1871): 368–69. 74. Sally Pratt McLean Greene, Cape Cod Folks (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904), 77–78. 75. See, for example, Common School Examiner and Review, McBride’s Comic Dialogues for School Exhibitions and Literary Entertainments, One Hundred Choice Selections, New School Dialogues, and Graham’s School Dialogues for Young People. 76. Theodore Dwight, The School-master’s Friend, with the Committee-Man’s Guide (New York: Roe Lockwood, 1835), 270, 272. 77. Ibid., 272–73. 78. Johnston, “Old Friends and New,” 200–201. 79. Stephen Crane, “Making an Orator,” in Whilomville Stories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900): 54, 63. 80. Angela Sorby, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005), xvii. 81. C. W. Bardeen, Commissioner Hume: A Story of New York Schools (Syracuse: C. W. Bardeen, 1899): 204–5. In order, the references are to Felicia Dorothea Hemans’s “Casabianca,” Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton’s “Bingen on the Rhine,” Thomas Buchanan Read’s “Sheridan’s Ride,” William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Ada Ellen Bayly’s In Golden Days, Spartacus’s speech to the Gladiators, Fitz-Greene Halleck’s “Marco Bozzaris,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” David Everett’s untitled poem that begins “You’d scarce expect one of my age,” Longfellow’s “Excelsior,” Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech, and William J. Hoppin’s “Come Over the River.” 82. Ibid., 205.

194 • Notes to Pages 49–53 83. In addition to highlighting the connections between curricular and class concerns, Bardeen’s discussion also demonstrates the gender issues underneath these public performances. Part of the issue is the self-display such performances entail. Clearly, the girls in Commissioner Hume, who braid their hair, wear their pantalets, and suck their thumbs, are not up to the task. Lindal Buchanan has shown that it was common for girls to deliver orations at exhibitions in the eighteenth century, but this became increasingly uncommon in the nineteenth (7–8). “As women petitioned political bodies for legislative changes, asked the powerful to fund educational and philanthropic projects, organized and directed benevolent and reform associations, lectured to mixed-sex audiences on political topics, and preached in churches and camp meetings,” restrictions on schoolgirl oratory increased (Buchanan, 8). And if boys’ attempts at oratory are often laughable, so too are girls’ literary attempts. While some schoolgirls, like Jane in A New-England Tale, succeed in crafting beautiful pieces, the pressure often proves too intense and students are pushed to cheat, as Elvira and Victoria in Roderick Hume do. Even written tests cannot prevent this temptation. In “Honesty in School” (1885), one of very few stories to contain a written examination, M. Ruth tells the story of Carrie, a girl who cheats on her history test and, worse still, lies about it. This focus on cheating schoolgirls betrays the anxieties about female education discussed in chapter 3. 84. Annie Cary, “A Story for Boys,” Maine Farmer, July 1, 1871: 4. 85. Theron Brown, The Red Shanty Boys; or, Pictures of New England School Life Thirty Years Ago (Chicago: Henry A. Sumner and Company, 1884), 329–30. 86. David Grambs, Death by Spelling: A Compendium of Tests, Super Tests, and Killer Bees (New York: Perennial Library, 1989), 31. 87. Richard E. Hodges, “In Adam’s Fall: A Brief History of Spelling Instruction in the United States,” in Reading & Writing Instruction in the United States: Historical Trends, ed. H. A. Robinson (Newark: International Reading Association, 1977), 7. 88. Maguire, American Bee, 63. 89. Grambs, Death by Spelling, 80. 90. See, for example, “The First Spelling-School in Camp,” “Killed in a Spelling Match,” “A Spelling Match,” and “The Spelling-Match Fever.” 91. Hodges, “In Adam’s Fall,” 3. 92. Richard L. Venezsky, “From Webster to Rice to Roosevelt: The Formative Years for Spelling Instruction and Spelling Reform in the U.S.A.,” in Cognitive Processes in Spelling, ed. Uta Frith (London: Academic Press, 1980), 18. 93. Horace Mann, Lecture on the Best Mode of Preparing and Using Spelling-Books, 1841, 16–17. 94. Professor Youmans, “Spelling—The Other Side,” The American Educational Monthly, July 1875, 317. 95. “Spelling for Amusement,” New York Times, April 9, 1875, 6. 96. Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster (Middlesex, UK: Echo Library, 2009), 25.

Notes to Pages 53–59 • 195 97. Ibid., 36. 98. Dean Dudley, Pictures of Life in England and America: Prose and Poetry (Boston: James French, 1851), 247. 99. Benjamin F. Taylor, “Winter Nights,” in January and June: Being Out-Door Thinkings, and Fire-Side Musings (New York: Samuel Hueston, 1854), 259. 100. Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 40. 101. Sam Whitsitt, “The Spelling Bee: What Makes it an American Institution?,” The Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 4 (2010): 888. 102. “An Incident in School Life,” The Connecticut Common School Journal and Annals of Education, June 1857, 169. 103. Taylor, “Winter Nights,” 255–56. 104. Brown, The Red Shanty Boys, 333–34. 105. For more on reformers’ fondness for battle metaphors, see Kaestle, especially 136. 106. Dudley, Pictures, 104. 107. See, for example, Article 5, The Independent, April 1875. 108. Burton, District School, 82. 109. John Greenleaf Whittier, “In School-Days,” in The Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1892), 350. 110. Allen Walker Read, “The Spelling Bee: A Linguistic Institution of the American Folk,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 56, no. 2 (1941): 500–501. 111. Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 35. 112. Dean, Pictures, 247. 113. Taylor, “Winter Nights,” 258. 114. Alexander Clark, The Old Log Schoolhouse (Philadelphia: J. W. Daughaday, 1864), 28–29. 115. Taylor, “Winter Nights,” 260.

Chapter 2 1. Richard Malcolm Johnston, “The Goosepond School,” in Dukesborough Tales: The Chronicles of Mr. Bill Williams (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1892), 23. 2. Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 15. 3. See Blinderman, Cremin (American Education), Fitts, Fuller (The Old Country School), Gaither (Homeschool), Joseph and Burnaford, Kaestle, Manning, Reese (America’s Public Schools), Rury, and Zimmerman. 4. This is the same Brinkly Glisson who appears in chapter 1 as the star of a school exhibition. “Old Friends and New,” the story discussed in chapter 1, and “The Goosepond School” are both part of Johnston’s Dukesborough Tales, a collection of loosely linked short stories. Brinkly’s showdown with Israel Meadows occurs first, and “Old Friends and New” appears later in the collection to demonstrate what a difference a good teacher makes.

196 • Notes to Pages 59–65 5. Johnston, “The Goosepond School,” 33, 37. 6. Quoted in William J. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 26. 7. In Small Wonder, Jonathan Zimmerman recounts numerous examples of real violence against nineteenth-century teachers, including a New England master who had his head stuffed in the stove, which singed his eyebrows off; a Virginia teacher bound hand and foot by his students, then abandoned; and a Massachusetts schoolmistress stoned to death by four students after she detained them past dismissal time (36). Even late in the period, such violence continued: in 1894, students in Nebraska nearly clubbed their schoolmistress to death, stopped only by the timely intervention of classmates (“Clubbed a Teacher”). 8. Rury, Education and Social Change, 81. 9. Myra C. Glenn, Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 45. Of course, differing visions of child nature and pedagogy were also at work in these debates. For more extensive discussion of the debates over corporal punishment, see Glenn, Sugg, Parille, and Hogan. 10. Quoted in Redding Sugg, Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 93. 11. Quoted in Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 24. 12. “Review of Dr. Wyman on Corporal Punishment in Schools,” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, April 1868, 121–22. For more on debates about corporal punishment, see Glenn, Sugg, Rury, and Parille. 13. While this novel has received much critical attention, these interpretations have largely ignored the common school scenes early in the novel. (See, for example, Alves, Boewe, Davis, and Evelev.) 14. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 24. 15. Ibid., 24–25. 16. Ibid., 26. 17. Ibid., 40. 18. “Turning a Teacher Out of School,” The Youth’s Companion, November 24, 1881, 438. 19. Ibid., 438. 20. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 17–19. 21. Kaestle, Pillars, 19. 22. “Our School Teachers,” The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, Embracing Literature in Every Department, January 1849, 24. 23. Ibid., 25.

Notes to Pages 65–71 • 197 24. Ibid., 26. 25. Horace Mann, Annual report, Together with the Report of the Secretary of the Board, Volumes 1–7 (Boston: Horace Mann League, 1949), 46. 26. Belle Rutledge, “My Brother’s Wife,” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, August 1862, 132–33. 27. Live Saxon, “Barred In,” St. Nicholas, an Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks, September 1877, 764. 28. Mrs. James Neall, “Patty Dree, Schoolmarm,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, June 1872, 543–44, 547. 29. Instead, the ending of the story focuses on what happens to Hazen and Patty, who eventually marry, making clear the ease with which the bonds of moral suasion, imagined as motherly or sisterly by reformers, could become something more. 30. Hezekiah Butterworth, “Experience of a Country School-Teacher,” Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, May 1866, 388–89. 31. Ibid., 390–91. 32. C. W. Bardeen, Roderick Hume: The Story of a New York Teacher (Syracuse: C. W. Bardeen, 1894), 98. 33. Richard A. Foster, The School in American Literature (Baltimore: Warwick and York, 1930), 158–59. 34. The distinction between these two kinds of school stories mirrors that which Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse draw between local color and regionalist fiction. In their view, local color fiction reinforces the representation of “regional persons” as “strange, exotic, or queer” while regionalist fiction approaches rural communities more sympathetically, “without predetermining what narrators or readers might find there” (29). While these sets of texts may appear to be very similar, the perspective from which they are told is quite different. 35. Mann, Annual report, 86, 24. In Boys at Home, Ken Parille shows that Mann’s vision of boyhood as problematic phase was far from unique in the nineteenth century: “Boyhood was repeatedly staged as a problem: important writers argued about the nature of boys, what books they should read, how they should be represented, the best methods of management and discipline, and how they and the space of boyhood they inhabited were similar to and different from their counterparts, girls and girlhood” (xix). 36. Ibid., 87–88. 37. “Barring Out,” Forrester’s Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine, and Fireside Companion, April 1, 1854, 101. 38. “George B. Emerson,” The American Journal of Education 5, no. 14 (1858): 418. 39. The story, by Maria Edgeworth, centers on a rabble-rouser who convinces his schoolmates to bar the master out of the schoolroom. He stirs the boys to action with the language of tyranny, liberty, and patriotism, but Edgeworth makes it clear that he does not know what these words mean. In the end, the students are punished and

198 • Notes to Pages 72–79 learn their lesson. In contrast to many American authors, Edgeworth teaches readers that political power and authority are and should be firmly vested in adults. (See Jenny Holt, Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008]). 40. Kaestle, Pillars, 136. 41. This argument about tyranny would eventually be turned against the reformers themselves, not just against teachers: according to Jonathan Zimmerman, in the early twentieth century, rural communities zealously defended their right to maintain their one-room schools by comparing the forces of consolidation to King George. 42. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, “The Turnout,” in Georgia Scenes: Characters, Incidents, etc., in the First Half-Century of the Republic (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1897), 96–97. 43. Ibid., 105–6. 44. Ibid., 97. 45. Clark, Regendering the School Story, 63. 46. D. S. Richardson, “Putting in the Summer Professionally.—II,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, August 1883, 174–75. 47. Ibid., 175–76. 48. E. Anthony Rotundo, “Boy Culture: Middle-Class Boyhood in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 17. 49. Richardson, “Putting in the Summer Professionally.—II,” 176. 50. Clark, The Old Log Schoolhouse, 48. 51. Robinson, “The School in Perrin,” 60. 52. Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 93. 53. William P. Randel, Edward Eggleston (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1963), 77. 54. Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 41. 55. George Cary Eggleston, The First of the Hoosiers: Reminiscences of Edward Eggleston; and of That Western Life Which He, First of All Men, Celebrated in Literature and Made Famous (Philadelphia: Drexel Biddle, 1903), 295. 56. Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 14. 57. See Rawley and Wolford. 58. See Johannsen, Pfitzer, Underwood, Wolford, Rawley, Randel, and Brown for literary criticism that focuses on Eggleston’s realism and dialect. The reviews from Scribner’s, The Literary World, The Eclectic, The Atlantic Monthly, and Old and New also lay out these accomplishments particularly clearly. 59. G. C. Eggleston, The First of the Hoosiers, 304. 60. Education scholars have long recognized the importance of The Hoosier Schoolmaster as a representation of nineteenth-century schooling. Willard Waller’s groundbreaking The Sociology of Teaching opens with a reference to the novel. The

Notes to Pages 79–88 • 199 novel and Eggleston’s place in education history are also acknowledged in Sugg, Zimmerman, Gaither (American Educational History Revisited), Preskill and Jacobvitz, Urban, Isenberg, and Cohen and Scheer. 61. Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 18–19. 62. Ibid., 19. 63. Foster, The School in American Literature, 173–74. 64. Wayne E. Fuller, The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 41, 115. 65. Ibid., 34. 66. Ibid., 126–27. 67. Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 22–24. 68. Ibid., 27. 69. Ibid., 32. 70. Ibid., 29. 71. Ibid., 65. 72. Ibid., 65. 73. Ibid., 66. 74. G. C. Eggleston, The First of the Hoosiers, 43. 75. Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 68, 71. 76. Ibid., 80. 77. Ibid., 106, 118. 78. Quoted in ibid., 9. 79. Ibid., 122. 80. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 93–94. 81. Foster, The School in American Literature, 169. 82. Quoted in Reese, America’s Public Schools, 22. 83. Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, Empire,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press: 1991), 255. 84. Bud T. Cochran, “The Indianas of Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier School-Master,” Old Northwest: A Journal of Regional Life and Letters 4 (1978): 388–89. 85. See, for example, Eggleston’s discussion of the revival of the spelling school and of his founding of a church inspired by the Church of Best Licks in his 1892 preface to the novel, as well as the interviews of Eggleston published in Forum and Outlook. Nor was this the last work Eggleston wrote that dealt with issues of schooling. He published The Hoosier Schoolboy in 1883. His history of early America, The Transit of Civilization, published in 1900, features a chapter on “The Tradition of Education.” As we saw in the introduction, Eggleston was also chosen to write the introduction of The Schoolmaster in Literature (1892), an anthology of schools representations used for teacher education (which includes the barring out chapter discussed here). 86. Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 235. 87. Ibid., 124.

200 • Notes to Pages 88–93 88. Edward Eggleston, “Formative Influences,” Forum, November 1890, 286. 89. Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 61. 90. For more information on representations of the barring out in the news, reform writing, and memoirs, see Fitts.

Chapter 3 1. Bardeen, Roderick Hume, 120. 2. Holmes, Elsie Venner, 422. I have located only four stories in which schoolmistresses marry their male students: E. W. Howe’s The Story of a Country Town (1883), Susan B. Long’s “Ralph Wallingford’s Affinity” (1875), Edward A. Rand’s “The Young Charcoal-Burner’s Sister” (1888), and Mrs. James Neall’s “Patty Dree, Schoolmarm” (1872; see chapter 2). “The Miseries of a Country School Teacher; Or, Tom Archer’s Education” (1865) is a story in pictures that also ends in a schoolmistress marrying her pupil. In S G C’s “Whipped into Love” (1868), a schoolboy falls for his teacher, but he never shares his feelings with her because he feels unworthy. Each of these romances develops quite differently from those discussed here because schoolmistresses are less able to express their romantic interest in their students than schoolmasters are. 3. Simon Watney, “School’s Out,” in Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 294. 4. To be sure, the prevalence of love plots in school fiction also reflects the prevalence of such plots in nineteenth-century fiction more broadly, and student-teacher romance is not the only form of romance to appear with frequency in school fiction. Schoolmistresses, for example, frequently marry superintendents, school board members, or community members. While the image of the spinster schoolmarm is a stereotype firmly entrenched in our historical imagination, the source for the image is not nineteenth-century fiction. 5. Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson, Schooling Sexualities (Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 1998), 108–9. 6. J. Brian Schwartz, “The Teacher, the Student and Other Stories: Images of Schools in Contemporary American Short Fiction,” (PhD diss., New York University, 2007), 131. 7. For more on school romances in film and pop culture, see Weaver, Weber and Mitchell, Keroes, Maher, Bauer, and Barreca and Morse. For more on press coverage of school sex scandals, see Cavanagh, Johnson, Jagodzinski, and Sikes. For more on pedophilia and schooling, see Cavanagh and Kincaid. For more of sexual harassment in education, see Dank and Fulda, Liston and Garrison. For more on the role of transference in the classroom, see Higgins, Cho, Alston, McWilliam, and Stillwaggon. For more on the liberating effects of student-teacher romance, see Gallop, Sikes, and Hooks. 8. Kett, Rites of Passage, 152–53. 9. Geraldine Joncich Clifford, “Man/Woman/Teacher: Gender, Family and Career

Notes to Pages 93–97 • 201 in American Educational History,” in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, ed. Donald R. Warren (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 318. 10. J. Shoshanna Ehrlich, “You Can Steal her Virginity but Not her Doll: The Nineteenth Century Campaign to Raise the Legal Age of Sexual Consent,” Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender 15 (2009): 231, 235. 11. These articles focus mainly on Catholic schoolteachers accused on “debauching the minds” of their pupils or “outraging” (raping) female students. This press coverage thus evidences not only a growing awareness of childhood sexual abuse, but also the rise in anti-Catholicism after the 1860s. It reflects a negative reaction to the increasing (and increasingly successful) efforts to build the Catholic school system, which culminated in the Church’s decree in 1884 that all American Catholic children should attend Catholic schools (See Reese, America’s Public Schools, and Miller). Articles on teacher sexual abuse published in the late nineteenth century include “A Pedagogue in Trouble,” “Carmichael Caught,” “Reward Offered for the Arrest of a Wicked School Teacher,” “Only a Kiss,” “Horrible Crime,” “Shameful Outrage in Hamilton,” “Arrest of a School Teacher,” “Criminal Bulletin,” “Forced to Elope,” “A Nameless Crime,” and “A Scoundrelly School-Teacher,” published between 1872 and 1890. 12. Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 106. 13. David B. Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 1–2, 31, 116. 14. Ibid., 10, 48, 80. 15. Timothy Shay Arthur, Cecilia Howard: Or, The Young Lady who had Finished Her Education (New York: John Allen, 1844), 10. 16. “Learn Everything, But Know Nothing,” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, November 1856, 518. 17. Mary Davenant, “Fanny’s Fine Education,” Ladies’ National Magazine, July 1846, 31. 18. Tyack and Hansot, Learning Together, 146. 19. Jane Grey Swisshelm, “Schools,” Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter, April 14, 1849. 20. Quoted in Tyack and Hansot, Learning Together, 103. 21. William A. Alcott, Confessions of a School Master (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 69. 22. Fanny Fern, “Men Teachers in Girls’ Schools,” in Caper-Sauce: A Volume of Chit-Chat about Men, Women, and Things (New York: G. W. Carleton and Co., 1872), 121. The Atlantic recently published an article that echoes some of Fern’s anxieties, “The Perils of Being a Male Teacher at an All-Girls School,” evidence of abiding concerns about gender and sexuality in the classroom. 23. John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Schoolmaster,” Saturday Evening Post, June 5, 1830, 1.

202 • Notes to Pages 97–106 24. J. K. Paulding, “The Yankee Schoolmaster,” in The American Book of Beauty (New York: Wilson and Co., 1845), 1. 25. Ibid., 54. 26. Johnston, “Old Friends and New,” 142–43. 27. Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820–1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 35. 28. Johnston, “Old Friends and New,” 171. 29. Baym, Woman’s Fiction, 41. 30. Anna MacDonald, “Our District Schoolmaster,” Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine, March 1856, 187–88. 31. Ibid., 189–90. 32. Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 107. 33. Alexander M. Sidorkin, Learning Relations: Impure Education, Deschooled Schools, and Dialogue with Evil (New York: P. Lang, 2002), 108. 34. Johnston, “Old Friends and New,” 206. 35. Rothman, Hands and Hearts, 38. 36. Milton T. Adkins, “My School at Pinhook,” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, March 1877, 262–63. 37. Ibid., 263. 38. Hezekiah Butterworth, The Log School-House on the Columbia: A Tale of the Pioneers of the Great Northwest (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890), 223–24. 39. Johnston, “Old Friends and New,” 171–72. 40. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 127. 41. Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier School-Boy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), 86. 42. John E. Flitcroft, The Novelist of Vermont: A Biographical and Critical Study of Daniel Pierce Thompson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), 53. 43. Ibid., 53, 124. 44. See the reviews from The Christian Register, The Common School Journal, The North American Review, The New York Daily Tribune, and The Universalist Quarterly. 45. “Locke Amsden; Or, the Schoolmaster,” The Common School Journal, November 1, 1847, 321. 46. Thompson, Locke Amsden, 16–17. 47. Ibid., 18. 48. Ibid., 107–8. 49. Ibid., 115. 50. Ibid., 118–22. 51. Ibid., 147–48. 52. Rothman, Hands and Hearts, 107.

Notes to Pages 107–117 • 203 53. Thompson, Locke Amsden, 143. 54. Ibid., 165–66. 55. Caroline M. Kirkland, A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 201–5. 56. Caroline Lee Hentz, Ernest Linwood: A Novel (Boston: J. P. Jewett and Co., 1856), 84–85. 57. Clark, The Old Log Schoolhouse, 46. 58. Bardeen, Commissioner Hume, 101–2. 59. Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, ed. Charles Neider (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1975), 38. 60. Rothman, Hands and Hearts, 43. 61. Lystra, Searching the Heart, 5. 62. Bret Harte, Cressy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1889), 203. 63. Ibid., 221. 64. Baym, Woman’s Fictions, 28. 65. Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” 37. 66. Holmes, Elsie Venner, 36. 67. “Catching the Schoolmaster,” The Youth’s Companion, November 28, 1878, 406. 68. See, for example, Barreca, Maher, Hooks, Higgins, Gallop, Cho, Alston, McWilliam, Sikes, and Stillwaggon. 69. Holmes, Elsie Venner, 175. 70. Harte, Cressy, 28. 71. Bardeen, Commissioner Hume, 101. 72. Ibid., 198. 73. Harte, Cressy, 43. 74. O. A. Bierstadt, “The Two Suitors,” Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, August 1882, 143. 75. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Woman Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 4. 76. Earl F. Yarington, The Portrayal of Woman’s Sentimental Power in American Domestic Fiction: The Novels of Mary Jane Holmes, 1825–1907 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007), 3–4. The few critics who have written on Holmes agree generally that her work collectively presents a positive image of the teaching profession, as many of her heroines become teachers. See Brashear, Yarington, Baym, McGuire, and Cummins (“A Common School”). Holmes wrote many other school stories, including “Bad Spelling” (1859), The English Orphans (1855), Meadow Brook (1857), and Aikenside (1880?). 77. Quoted in Lisa Logan, “Mary Jane Hawes Holmes (1825–1907),” in Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Biographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Denise D. Knight and Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 233.

204 • Notes to Pages 117–131 78. Yarington, Portrayal, 6. 79. Mary Jane Holmes, Tempest and Sunshine or, Life in Kentucky (New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1854), 2. 80. Ibid., 11. 81. Ibid., 11. 82. Ibid., 23. 83. Ibid., 28–29. 84. Ibid., 26. 85. Ibid., 40. 86. Epstein and Johnson, Schooling Sexualities, 119–20. 87. Holmes, Tempest and Sunshine, 47–49. 88. Ibid., 50. 89. Ibid., 63–68. 90. Jane P. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 127. 91. Holmes, Tempest and Sunshine, 365. 92. Karl Kabelac, “C. W. Bardeen,” in American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638– 1889: Part 1: A-M (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 1986), 39. 93. See the reviews from the Syracuse Evening Herald, Potsdam Courier and Freeman, the Iowa Normal Monthly, the Rome Sentinel and Literary Notes, included at the end of the novel. 94. Bardeen, Roderick Hume, 7. 95. Ibid., 77–78. 96. Ibid., 89–92. 97. Ibid., 119. 98. Ibid., 146. 99. Ibid., 164. 100. Ibid., 132–35. 101. Ibid., 173. 102. Ibid., 180. 103. Ibid., 212–13. 104. Ibid., 213–16. 105. Ibid., 263. 106. Ibid., 263–65. 107. Ibid., 282–83. 108. Ibid., 311–13. 109. Ibid., 315. 110. Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 207–8. 111. Bardeen, Roderick Hume, 315.

Notes to Pages 131–137 • 205 Chapter 4 1. “The Teacher,” American Phrenological Journal, March 1867, 78. 2. Jo Anne Preston, “Domestic Ideology, School Reformers, and Female Teachers: Schoolteaching Becomes Women’s Work in Nineteenth-Century New England,” The New England Quarterly 66, no. 4 (1993): 542. 3. Many scholars have studied the creation and promotion of the mother-teacher model at length. See Perlmann and Margo, Clifford, Preston (“Domestic Ideology” and “Female Aspiration”), Larsen, Rousmaniere, Enoch, Robbins, Sugg, Weiler, Miller, Hoffman, Fitts, and Fowler. 4. Kathleen Weiler, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850– 1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 12. 5. Jo Anne Preston, “Female Aspiration and Male Ideology: School-Teaching in Nineteenth-Century New England,” Current Issues in Women’s History (1989): 176. 6. Robbins, Managing Literacy, 111. 7. Horace Mann, “Eighth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Education,” in Education in the United States: A Documentary History, ed. Sol Cohen (New York: Random House, 1974), 1316. 8. Joel Perlmann and Robert A. Margo, Women’s Work? American Schoolteachers, 1650–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 8. 9. Deborah Fitts, “Una and the Lion: The Feminization of District School-Teaching and its Effects on the Role of Students and Teachers in 19th Century Massachusetts,” in Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective, ed. Barbara Finkelstein (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979), 140. 10. Sugg, Motherteacher, 16–17, 38. 11. Quoted in Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1981), 3. 12. Preston, “Aspiration,” 178. 13. Sandra Brandmark Fowler, “The Character of the Woman Teacher during her Emergence as a Full-Time Professional in Nineteenth Century America: Stereotypes vs. Personal Histories,” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1985), 19. 14. Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession, xvii–xviii. 15. Eliza H. Morton, “Teacher and Parent,” Maine Farmer, February 6, 1875, 2. 16. Larsen, Making and Shaping, 95. 17. “The Relation of the Teacher to the Moral Welfare of His Pupils,” The Connecticut Common School Journal and Annals of Education, August 1858, 1. 18. B. R. Hall, “The Dignity of the Teacher,” Episcopal Recorder, March 18, 1848, 1. 19. Mary Peabody Mann and Elizabeth Peabody, Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide (Boston: T. O. H. P. Burnham, 1863), 116. 20. Sarah J. B. Hale, Sketches of American Character (Boston: Putnam & Hunt, 1829), 126. 21. Burton, District School, 28, 22.

206 • Notes to Pages 137–144 22. Ibid., 44. 23. Mary Irving, “The Teacher’s Trial and Reward,” National Era, August 4, 1853, 121. 24. Ibid., 121. 25. Mary Irving, “The Teacher’s Trial and Reward, Part II,” National Era, August 11, 1853, 126. 26. Mann and Peabody, Moral Culture, 116. 27. “The Schoolmistress in Literature,” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, May 1860. The few literary critics and historians who have considered the schoolmistress in nineteenth-century literature have voiced similar concerns about the lack of positive representations. See, for example, Rousmaniere, Wyman, and Shockley. Amy Cummins offers a more balanced view, highlighting positive representations of the maternal model of instruction alongside negative portraits of schoolmistresses. 28. Carol J. Singley, Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4. 29. Cremin, American Education, 245. 30. Singley, Adopting America, 90. 31. Ibid., 3. 32. E. Wayne Carp, “Introduction: A Historical Overview of American Adoption,” in Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives, ed. E. Wayne Carp (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 5. 33. Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 8. 34. Singley, Adopting America, 83–84. 35. Fanny Fern, “Shadows and Sunbeams,” in Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Port-Folio: Second Series (Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854), 27–28. 36. Hentz, Ernest Linwood, 312. 37. Interestingly, only two narratives in my archive portray the schoolmaster as adoptive parent when the student is male. Ralph in The Hoosier Schoolmaster becomes an adoptive father to Shocky when he marries his sister. In Hezekiah Butterworth’s The Log School-House on the Columbia (1893), schoolmaster Marlowe Mann promises an Indian chief that he will be a father to his son after his death, but the son dies before he can enact this promise. 38. Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 200), 3, 8. In addition to “The Idyl of Red Gulch” and the multiple versions of “M’liss,” discussed here, Harte’s Cressy (1889; see chapter 3), “A Pupil of Chestnut Ridge” (1896), and “The New Assistant at Pine Clearing School” (1891) also deal with student-teacher relationships. 39. “Another California Swindle,” Bancroftiana: Published Occasionally by the Friends of the Bancroft Library 72 (1979), 1–2.

Notes to Pages 144–152 • 207 40. Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 105, 118. 41. “Another California Swindle,” 2. 42. Thomas S. Hischak, American Literature on Stage and Screen: 525 Works and their Adaptations (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2012), 149. 43. Harte was aware of the fact that the relationship between a schoolmaster and a female student could take on sexual undertones. In one of his later stories, “A Pupil of Chestnut Ridge” (1896), a schoolmaster finds himself strangely attracted to a student, recently “rescued” from the care of Catholic priests. The resolution of the story excuses his attraction: the student is actually a grown woman who used her adoptive parents’ virulent anti-Catholicism as a means to free herself from the priests and run off with the man she loves. 44. Bret Harte, “The Work on Red Mountain,” accessed January 14, 2013, http:// twainhartevisitor.com/bretharte/story.php?story=mliss1&author=bretharte. 45. “Relation of the Teacher,” 230. 46. Harte, “Red Mountain,” chap. 2. 47. J. David Stevens, “‘She War a Woman’: Family Roles, Gender, and Sexuality in Bret Harte’s Western Fiction,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 69, no. 3 (1997): 575–76. 48. Harte, “Red Mountain,” Ch. 3. 49. Ibid., chap. 4. 50. Ibid., chap. 4. 51. Bret Harte, “M’liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain,” in The Luck of Roaring Camp, In the Carquinez Woods, and Other Stories and Sketches (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1929), 299–301. 52. Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte (New York: Twayne, 1992), 99. 53. Harte, “M’liss,” 302–3. 54. Ibid., 315. 55. R. G. Densmore and Bret Harte, Mliss. An Idyll of Red Mountain. A Story of California in 1863. By Bret Harte, Early American Fiction, 1789–1875 (ProQuest), 32. 56. Ibid., 49–51. 57. Ibid., 57. 58. Ibid., 80. 59. Ibid., 66. 60. Ibid., 129. 61. The storyline changes the theatrical version of “M’liss” made speak still more strongly about contemporary audiences’ inability to appreciate this student-teacher bond as parental and protective. At the end of the play, after M’liss has suitably aged, she marries Mr. Gray. See Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906. 62. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xxii. 63. Quoted in Kate Rousmaniere, “Good Teachers Are Born, Not Made: Self-Regu-

208 • Notes to Pages 153–161 lation in the Work of Nineteenth-Century American Women Teachers,” in Discipline, Moral Regulation, and Schooling: A Social History, ed. Kate Rousmaniere, Kari Dehli, and Ning de Coninck-Smith (New York: Garland, 1997), 120. 64. Bret Harte, “The Idyl of Red Gulch,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 3, no. 6 (1869), 569. 65. Mann, Annual report, 45. 66. Harte, “Red Gulch,” 572. 67. Ibid., 573. 68. Quoted in Scharnhorst, Bret Harte: Opening, 44. 69. Harte, “Red Gulch,” 574. 70. Singley, Adopting America, 12. 71. Claudia Nelson, Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850–1929 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 43. 72. Little Bob True, The Driver Boy (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1858), 249. 73. Sugg, Motherteacher, 106. 74. The failure of these schoolmistresses as mother-figures is particularly interesting in light of the contrast it forms with boarding school narratives, in which teachers likewise live with their students. According to Claire Chantell, women teachers in boarding school novels are frequently “supramaternal,” providing far better care and instruction than biological mothers. 75. See Gebhard, “Constance Fenimore Woolson Rewrites Bret Harte.” 76. Constance Fenimore Woolson, “The Old Five,” Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art, November 1876, 438. 77. Ibid., 439–40. 78. Teachers appear in a number of Woolson’s other works, and her work as a whole suggests that she saw the profession as an unsatisfying one that women entered for financial reasons rather than sentimental ones. See “Raspberry Island,” “A Flower of the Snow,” “Rodman the Keeper,” Anne, For the Major, “The Waldenburg Road,” “Cicely’s Christmas,” and “Crowder’s Cove.” 79. See, for example, Kaestle, Rury, Hogan, and A. Green. 80. Woolson, “The Old Five,” 445. 81. Ibid., 446. 82. Singley, Adopting America, 90. 83. Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy, 38. 84. Woolson, “The Old Five,” 446. 85. Sharon L. Dean, “Constance Woolson’s Southern Sketches,” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 25, no. 3 (1986): 283. 86. Victoria Brehm, “Castle Somewhere: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Reconstructed Great Lakes,” in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, ed. Victoria Brehm (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001), 103.

Notes to Pages 161–166 • 209 87. Harry Forrest Lupold, “Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Genre of Regional Fiction,” Ohioana Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1986): 132. 88. John R. Adams, Edward Everett Hale (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), 4. 89. George S. Merriam, “Reminiscences of Edward Everett Hale: The Unnamed Saints,” Outlook, November 12, 1910, 582. 90. For more background on the close ties between freedmen’s schooling and the common school movement, see Williams, Morris, Jones (“Women who were more than Men” and Soldiers of Light and Love), and Butchart. 91. Jacqueline Jones, “Women who were more than Men: Sex and Status in Freedmen’s Teaching,” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1979): 49. 92. Ronald E. Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862–1875 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 23–24. 93. Woman’s Work for the Lowly, as Illustrated in the Work of the American Missionary Association Among the Freedmen (Boston: South Boston Inquirer Press, 1874), 4. 94. Schools and teachers appear frequently in Hale’s fiction and nonfiction. See “Where Shall Polly Go to School,” “Half-Time in Schools,” A New England Boyhood, and Mr. Tangier’s Vacations. 95. Robert C. Morris, Reading, ‘riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 3. 96. William Gannett and Edward Everett Hale, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” The North American Review, July 1865, 19, 28. 97. Edward Everett Hale, Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars: A Story of the “Original Ten” (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878), v. 98. Ibid., 42. 99. Ibid., 24. 100. Ibid., 73. 101. Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 151. 102. Laura M. Towne and Rupert S. Holland, Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 220. 103. Hale, Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars, 73. 104. Ibid., iv–v. 105. Ibid., 74–77. 106. Most scholarship on the mother-teacher ideal written today replicates this focus on the teacher, not the student. For more background on reformers’ constructions of the ideal, see Perlmann and Margo, Clifford (“Daughters into Teachers” and “Man/Woman/Teacher”), Preston (“Domestic Ideology” and “Female Aspiration”), Larsen, Rousmaniere, Enoch, Robbins (Managing Literacy), Sugg, Weiler, Miller, Hoffman, Fitts, and Fowler. The above quote from the AMA pamphlet likewise sup-

210 • Notes to Pages 167–174 ports this claim, celebrating the teacher’s role in elevating the students, not the students’ own progress. 107. Ibid., 24. Considering Rachel’s relationship with Tirah alongside other white teachers’ relationships with black students in fiction published around the same time demonstrates how progressive Hale’s portrait is. Mollie Ainslie, the freedmen’s teacher in Albion Tourgée’s Bricks Without Straw (1880), provides a strong contrast. Much like Rachel, Mollie is idealized, but Tourgée’s vision of African American education offers far less agency and insight to African Americans. Mollie never considers making companions of the African Americans with whom she works, in marked contrast to Rachel. Even though she spends every day with children, when she finally meets a white child, Mollie takes him into her arms with “unbounded delight,” having not seen for many years “a child that she could fondle and caress” (238). She essentially adopts this child for the brief remainder of his life, becoming his nurse at the peril of her own. Still, Mollie is an improvement over the protagonist of Woolson’s “King David” (1878), a schoolmaster who is animated by a sense of duty rather than of love. He throws away his dinner rather than eat it after two African Americans sit at his table. 108. Peter Schmidt, Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865–1920 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 49–50. 109. Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy, 110. 110. Hale, Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars, 85–86. 111. Janice H. Koistinen-Harris, Social Reform, Taste, and the Construction of Virtue in American Literature, 1870–1910 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 3, 29. 112. Singley, Adopting America, 52–53.

Conclusion 1. Rosenfeld and Sher, “Urbanization of Rural Schools,” 20. 2. Cremin, Transformation, viii–ix. 3. Paul Theobald, “Country School Curriculum and Governance: The One-Room School Experience in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest,” American Journal of Education 101, no. 2 (1993): 132. 4. Arthur Foff, “Scholars and Scapegoats,” English Journal 47 (1958): 120. 5. Foster, The School in American Literature, 184. 6. Mindy Spearman, “The Reading Circle Movement in Texas,” American Educational History Journal 34, no. 1 (2007): 24–25. 7. Hubert M. Skinner, “Growth and Benefits of Reading Circles,” in Circular of Information of the United States Bureau of Education (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1886), 157–58. 8. Eggleston, introduction, 11–12.

Notes to Pages 174–175 • 211 9. Skinner, Schoolmaster, 610, 613. 10. Ibid., 495. 11. Ibid., 620. 12. Ibid., 312.

Bibliography

Primary Sources Adkins, Milton T. “My School at Pinhook.” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, March 1877, 259–63. Alcott, William A. Confessions of a School Master. New York: Arno Press, 1969. “Arrest of a School Teacher.” Commercial Advertiser, June 1873, 3. Arthur, Timothy Shay. Cecilia Howard: Or, The Young Lady who had Finished Her Education. New York: John Allen, 1844. Article 3. The Pearl and Literary Gazette, November 10, 1833, 59A. “ART. V.———” ‘The District School as It Was.’” Christian Examiner and General Review, July 1833, 324–27. Article 5. The Independent, April 1, 1875, 17. “Article XII: A New-England Tale.” The Christian Disciple and Theological Review, May 1, 1822, 205. Article 7. Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, September 1882, 298–99. Augusta, Clara. “Florence Knowlton’s Fortune.” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, September 1871, 230–33. Bardeen, Charles William. Commissioner Hume: A Story of New York Schools. Syracuse: C. W. Bardeen, 1899. ———. Roderick Hume: The Story of a New York Teacher. Syracuse: C. W. Bardeen, 1894. “Barring Out.” Forrester’s Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine, and Fireside Companion, April 1, 1854, 101. “Barring Out.” Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture, June 23, 1849, 4. “Barring Out.” The New York Teacher and American Educational Monthly, July 1869, 256–62. “Barring Out: II.” The New York Teacher and American Educational Monthly, August 1869, 304–11.

214 • Bibliography Benedict, Frank Lee. “Cross-Purposes.” Peterson’s Magazine, October 1871, 270–77. Bierstadt, O. A. “The Two Suitors.” Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, August 1882, 142–50. “A Book Sweet in the Mouth and Sweet in the Belly.” Oneida Circular, June 30, 1873, 210–12. Boudrye, Louis N. “The First Spelling-School in Camp.” Christian Advocate and Journal, March 10, 1864, 73. Bowen, James L. “Our Teacher.” Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, June 1883, 578–81. Brown, Isaac Hinton, and Charles Walter Brown. Common School Examiner and Review. Chicago: A. Flanagan Company, 1898. Brown, Theron. The Red Shanty Boys; or, Pictures of New England School Life Thirty Years Ago. Chicago: Henry A. Sumner and Company, 1884. “Brutal Outrage in Ames, Iowa.” Daily Inter Ocean, June 22, 1875, 5. Bullard, Laura C. Now-A-Days!. New York: T. L. Magagnos, 1854. Burton, Warren. The District School as It Was. Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 2010. Butterworth, Hezekiah. “Experience of a Country School-Teacher.” Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, May 1866, 388–91. ———. The Log School-House on the Columbia: A Tale of the Pioneers of the Great Northwest. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890. “Carmichael Caught.” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, May 2, 1890, 4. Cary, Annie. “A Story for Boys.” Maine Farmer, July 1, 1871, 4. “Catching the Schoolmaster.” The Youth’s Companion, November 28, 1878, 406. Clark, Alexander. The Old Log Schoolhouse. Philadelphia: J. W. Daughaday, 1864. “Clubbed a Teacher.” School Board Journal, January 1894, 8. “The Colored School Exhibition.” The Liberator, March 17, 1865, 42. “Common School Examination.” Western Recorder, February 28, 1826, 35. “Common Schools.” The Family Lyceum, August 3, 1833, 203. Covell, John E. New School Dialogues. New York: Collins and Brother, 1871. Crane, Stephen. “Making an Orator.” In Whilomville Stories, 54–63. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900. “Critical Notices.” Broadway Journal, November 29, 1845, 320–23. Crosby, William G. “The Teacher.” The Common School Journal, December 1, 1849, 362–65. Davenant, Mary. “Fanny’s Fine Education.” Ladies’ National Magazine, July 1846, 25–31. Densmore, R. G., and Bret Harte. Mliss. An Idyll of Red Mountain. A Story of California in 1863. By Bret Harte. Early American Fiction, 1789–1875 (ProQuest). “The District School.” The Literary Journal, and Weekly Register of Science and the Arts, August 31, 1833, 102–3. “The District School as it was.” Christian Examiner and General Review, July 1833, 324–27. Dudley, Dean. Pictures of Life in England and America; Prose and Poetry. Boston: James French, 1851.

Bibliography • 215 Dwight, Theodore. The School-master’s Friend, with the Committee-Man’s Guide. New York: Roe Lockwood, 1835. Edgeworth, Maria. “The Barring-Out; or Party Spirit.” In Stories for Children, From “Parent’s Assistant”, 1–70. London: C. Baldwin, 1850. “Edward Eggleston: An Interview.” Outlook, February 6, 1897, 431–37. Eggleston, Edward. “Formative Influences.” Forum, November 1890, 279–90. ———. The Hoosier Schoolboy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883. ———. The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Middlesex, UK: Echo Library, 2009. ———. Introduction to The Schoolmaster in Literature, edited by Hubert M. Skinner, 5–12. New York: American Book Company, 1892. ———. The Transit of Civilization from England to America in the Seventeenth Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959. Eggleston, George Cary. The First of the Hoosiers: Reminiscences of Edward Eggleston; and of That Western Life Which He, First of All Men, Celebrated in Literature and Made Famous. Philadelphia: Drexel Biddle, 1903. Elliot, S. H. “Libbie May, The Young School Teacher.” The Connecticut Common School Journal and Annals of Education, July 1856, 204–8. “The Examination.” The Youth’s Companion, August 29, 1828, 55–56. “Examination of Schools.” Boston Recorder, March 1, 1839, 34. “Examination of Schools.” The District School Journal of the State of New York, August 1, 1841, 14. Fern, Fanny (Sarah Payson Willis Parton). “Men Teachers in Girls’ Schools.” In Caper-Sauce: A Volume of Chit-Chat about Men, Women, and Things, 121–24. New York: G. W. Carleton and Co., 1872. ———. “Shadows and Sunbeams.” In Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Port-Folio: Second Series, 13–35. Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854. “The First Examination of Schools.” The Common School Journal, December 2, 1839, 358–61. “Forced to Elope.” Plain Dealer, July 23, 1889, 6. Gannett, William, and Edward Everett Hale. “The Freedmen at Port Royal.” The North American Review, July 1865, 1–27. ———. “General Orders of the Freedmen’s Bureau.” The North American Review, October 1865, 528–49. Garett, P. One Hundred Choice Selections. Philadelphia: P. Garett and Company, 1890. Gay, Mary Ann Harris. The Pastor’s Story, And Other Pieces; Or, Prose and Poetry. Nashville: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1881. “George B. Emerson.” The American Journal of Education 5, no.14 (1858): 416–26. Graham, George C. Graham’s School Dialogues for Young People. New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1878. Greene, Sarah Pratt McLean. Cape Cod Folks. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904. Guild, Josephus Conn. Old Times in Tennessee, with Historical, Personal, and Political Scraps and Sketches. Nashville: Tavel, Eastman, & Howell, 1878.

216 • Bibliography Hale, Edward Everett. “Half-Time in Schools.” The North American Review, November 1884, 443–52. ———. Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars: A Story of the “Original Ten”. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878. ———. Mr. Tangier’s Vacations. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888. ———. A New England Boyhood. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. ———. Ten Times One Is Ten. Boston: Little, Brown, 1917. ———. “Where Shall Polly Go to School?” The Cosmopolitan, May 1892, 111–15. Hale, Sarah J. B. Sketches of American Character. Boston: Putnam & Hunt, 1829. Hall, B. R. “The Dignity of the Teacher.” Episcopal Recorder, March 18, 1848, 1. Hamilton, Gail. “The Aim of Examinations.” The Independent, August 5, 1875, 1. Harbour, L. “Our School Exhibition.” The Youth’s Companion, September 24, 1885, 374. Harte, Bret. Cressy. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co, 1889. ———. “The Idyl of Red Gulch.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 3, no. 6 (1869): 569–75. ———. “M’liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain.” In The Luck of Roaring Camp, In the Carquinez Woods, and Other Stories and Sketches, 233–321. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1929. ———. “The New Assistant at Pine Clearing School.” In Colonel Starbottle’s Client and Some Other People, 175–214. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1892. ———. “The Pupil of Chestnut Ridge.” In Trent’s Trust, and Other Stories, 211–30. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903. ———. “The Work on Red Mountain.” Accessed January 14, 2013. http://twainhartevisitor.com/bretharte/story.php?story=mliss1&author=bretharte. Hentz, Caroline Lee. Ernest Linwood: A Novel. Boston: J. P. Jewett and Co, 1856. Holmes, Mary Jane. Aikenside: And the Old Red House Among the Mountains. New York: New York Book Co, 1909. ———. “Bad Spelling.” In Maggie Lee!, 1–4. Toronto: J. Ross Robertson, 1881. ———. The English Orphans, Or, a Home in the New World. New York: D. Appleton, 1970. ———. Meadow Brook. New York: Miller, Orton, 1970. ———. Tempest and Sunshine or, Life in Kentucky. New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1854. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny. New York: Arno Press, 1976. “The Hoosier Schoolmaster.” The Literary World: A Monthly Review of Current Literature, February 1, 1872, 131–32. “The Hoosier Schoolmaster.” Old and New, March 1873, 358–59. “The Hoosier Schoolmaster.” Scribner’s Monthly, March 1872, 638. “Horrible Crime.” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, April 17, 1876, 2. Howe, E. W. The Story of a Country Town. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961.

Bibliography • 217 Hoyt, Charles Hale. A Midnight Bell. Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections (ProQuest). “In a Hoop Skirt.” Flag of Our Union, September 5, 1868, 576. “Incidents in the Life of a Schoolmaster.” The New York Daily Tribune, November 13, 1847, 1. “An Incident in School Life.” The Connecticut Common School Journal and Annals of Education, June 1857, 169–75. Irving, Mary. “The Teacher’s Trial and Reward.” National Era, August 4, 1853, 121. ———. “The Teacher’s Trial and Reward, Part II.” National Era, August 11, 1853. 125–26. Irving, Washington. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” In The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, edited by Charles Neider, 31–56. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1975. Jennings, W. S. “Morgan Co. Schools Like Those of Grandfather’s Day: Lack of Funds Delays Improvement.” Indiana Farmer’s Guide, March 5, 1921, 1. Jewett, Sarah Orne. “A Native of Winby.” In A Native of Winby, and Other Tales, 1–38. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893. Johnston, Richard Malcolm. “The Goosepond School.” In Dukesborough Tales: The Chronicles of Mr. Bill Williams, 1–46. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1892. ———. “Old Friends and New.” In Dukesborough Tales: The Chronicles of Mr. Bill Williams, 142–244 . New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1892. Jones, Louise Coffin. “A Hoosier Idyl.” Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, September 1885, 276–88. J. W. D. “Two Country School-Masters on Their Travels.” The American Educational Monthly, November 1874, 503–11. ———. “Two Country School-Masters on Their Travels: II.” The American Educational Monthly, December 1874, 536–45. “Killed in a Spelling Match.” The National Police Gazette, March 11, 1882, 13. Kirkland, Caroline M. A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. ———. “The Schoolmaster’s Progress.” In Western Clearings, 153–67. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846. “Learn Everything, But Know Nothing.” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, November 1856, 518–20. “Literary Notices.” New-England Magazine, June 1833, 517–22. “Literary Notices.” The New-York Mirror: A Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts, July 27, 1833, 26–27. Little Bob True, The Driver Boy. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1858. “Locke Amsden; Or, the Schoolmaster.” The Common School Journal, November 1, 1847, 321–31. “Locke Amsden, Or the Schoolmaster.” The North American Review, January 1848, 248–49.

218 • Bibliography Long, Susan B. “Ralph Wallingford’s Affinity.” Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine, October 1875, 582–97. Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin. “The Turnout.” In Georgia Scenes: Characters, Incidents, etc., in the First Half-Century of the Republic, 94–107. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1897. Lovering, Josie Signor. “My Success as a Match-Maker.” Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine, March 1861, 233–36. MacDonald, Anna. “Our District Schoolmaster.” Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine, March 1856, 285–89. Mann, Horace. Annual Report, Together with the Report of the Secretary of the Board, Volumes 1–7. Boston: Horace Mann League, 1949. ———. Lecture on the Best Mode of Preparing and Using Spelling-Books, 1841. ———. “Eighth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Education.” In Education in the United States: A Documentary History, edited by Sol Cohen. New York: Random House, 1974. ———. “Report for 1848.” In Annual Reports on Education, 640–758. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1872. Mann, Mary Peabody, and Elizabeth Peabody. Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide. Boston: T. O. H. P. Burnham, 1863. “Mary Morris and Her Pupils.” Michigan Farmer, May 14, 1859, 158. McBride, H. Elliott. McBride’s Comic Dialogues for School Exhibitions and Literary Entertainments. New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1873. McCormick, Eliot. “The Prize of Upper Nineveh: A Story.” Christian Union, May 8, 1878, 393–94. Merriam, George S. “Reminiscences of Edward Everett Hale: The Unnamed Saints.” Outlook, November 12, 1910, 581–88. “The Miseries of a Country School Teacher; Or, Tom Archer’s Education.” Dollar Monthly Magazine, February 1865, 167–68. Morton, Eliza H. “Teacher and Parent.” Maine Farmer, February 6, 1875, 2. “A Nameless Crime.” Salt Lake Tribune, April 24, 1875, 7. Neall, Mrs. James. “Patty Dree, Schoolmarm.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, June 1872, 539–49. Nemo. “Examination of Schools.” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, May 1863, 145–51. “A New-England Tale.” Christian Register, June 7, 1822, 170. “New Publications.” Christian Register, November 6, 1847, 179. “Notices.” American Annals of Education, June 1833, 288. “Only a Kiss.” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, July 31, 1880, 1. Orne, Caroline. “Olivia Weston: The Young Schoolmistress.” The Ladies’ Companion, February 1842, 179–84. “Our Exchanges.” The Rhode Island Schoolmaster, January 1873, 115–16.

Bibliography • 219 “Our School Teachers.” The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, Embracing Literature in Every Department, January 1849, 24–26. Page, David P. Theory and Practice of Teaching. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Paulding, J. K. “The Yankee Schoolmaster.” In The American Book of Beauty, 50–55. New York: Wilson and Co., 1845. “A Pedagogue in Trouble.” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, January 24, 1884, 3. Penn, Shirley. “Waiting Upon Sue.” Oliver Optic’s Magazine, December 1875, 910–12. “Pete.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 6, no. 4 (1871): 366–71. “The Popular School and the Teacher in English Literature.” The American Journal of Education 3, no.8 (1857): 155–60. “Preparing for an Examination.” Flag of Our Union, June 5, 1869, 360. “A Queer Courtship.” Maine Farmer, January 5, 1878, 4. “Recent Literature.” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1872, 362–69. “The Relation of the Teacher to the Moral Welfare of His Pupils.” The Connecticut Common School Journal and Annals of Education, August 1858, 229–32. Review 3. The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, March 1872, 378. Review 3. The Universalist Quarterly and General Review, October 1847, 431. Review 4. Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, January 1874, 39. “Review of Dr. Wyman on Corporal Punishment in Schools.” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, April 1868, 119–27. “Review of New Publications: A New-England Tale.” Christian Spectator, October 1, 1822, 532–41. “Reward Offered for the Arrest of a Wicked School Teacher.” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, May 18, 1887, 1. Richardson, D. S. “Putting in the Summer Professionally.———I.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, July 1883, 3–8. ———. “Putting in the Summer Professionally.———II.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, August 1883, 173–78. Robinson, M. E. “The School in Perrin: ———Or, ———The New Teacher.” Flag of Our Union, February 25, 1854, 60. Ruth, M. “Honesty in School.” Christian Advocate, May 21, 1885, 329–30. Rutledge, Belle. “My Brother’s Wife.” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, August 1862, 130–37. Saxon, Live. “Barred In.” St. Nicholas, an Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks, September 1877, 764. S C G. “Whipped into Love.” Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, October 1868, 365–66. “The Schoolmistress in Literature.” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, May 1860, 161–67. “School Examinations.”Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, September 1852, 264–67.

220 • Bibliography “School Examinations and Exhibitions.” The Connecticut Common School Journal and Annals of Education, May 1857, 152–54. “A School Examination: Its Interest, Intrinsic and Incidental,” Christian Observer, September 17, 1857, 151. “School Exhibition.” Circular, February 13, 1865, 384. “The School-Teacher at Bottle Flat.” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, February 1876, 161–68. “A Scoundrelly School-Teacher.” San Francisco Bulletin, November 27, 1872, 44. Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. A New-England Tale; Or, Sketches of New-England Character and Manners. New York: E. Bliss & E. White, 1822. “Shameful Outrage in Hamilton.” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, February 26, 1886. Shinn, Charles Howard. “Shasta Lilies.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 6, no. 36 (1885): 638–46. Skinner, Hubert M. “Growth and Benefits of Reading Circles.” In Circular of Information of the United States Bureau of Education. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1886. ———. The Schoolmaster in Literature. New York: American Book Company, 1892. “Spelling for Amusement.” New York Times, April 9, 1875, 6. “A Spelling Match: Amusing Scenes in Cooper Institute Last Evening.” New York Times, April 4, 1875, 2. “The Spelling-Match Fever.” New York Times, April 9, 1875, 7. Swisshelm, Jane Grey. “Schools.” Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter, April 14, 1849. Taylor, Benjamin F. “Winter Nights.” In January and June: Being Out-Door Thinkings, and Fire-Side Musings, 249–61. New York: Samuel Hueston, 1854. “The Teacher.” American Phrenological Journal, March 1867, 78. “A Teacher’s Depravity.” New York Herald, August 31, 1882, 4. Thompson, Daniel P. Locke Amsden, Or, the Schoolmaster: A Tale. Boston: B. B. Mussey, 1970. T. K. P. “School Examinations.” The Connecticut Common School Journal and Annals of Education, April 1865, 109–11. Tourgée, Albion W. Bricks Without Straw. New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1880. Towne, Laura M., and Rupert S. Holland. Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. “Turning a Teacher Out of School.” The Youth’s Companion, November 24, 1881, 438. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Ann Arbor: Borders Classics, 2006. “Ventilation Essential to Health.” Christian Register, December 9, 1848, 100. Ware, Willie. “Marion Clyde: ———Or.———What I Lost and Gained. A Leaf from a Journal.” Flag of Our Union, July 13, 1861, 7. Whittier, John Greenleaf. “In School-Days.” In The Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, 350. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1892.

Bibliography • 221 ———. “The Schoolmaster.” Saturday Evening Post, June 5, 1830, 1. Woman’s Work for the Lowly, as Illustrated in the Work of the American Missionary Association Among the Freedmen. Boston: South Boston Inquirer Press, 1874. Woolson, Constance Fenimore. Anne. New York: Arno Press, 1977. ———. “Cicely’s Christmas.” Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art, December 30, 1871, 753–58. ———. “Crowder’s Cove: A Story of the War,” Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art, March 18, 1876, 357–62. ———. “A Flower of the Snow.” The Galaxy, January 1874, 76–85. ———. For the Major. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1883. ———. “King David.” Scribner’s Monthly, April 1878, 781–88. ———. “The Old Five.” Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art, November 1876, 438–46. ———. “Raspberry Island.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June/November 1877, 737–45. ———. “Rodman the Keeper.” In Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches, 9–41. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899. ———. “The Waldenburg Road.” Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science, and Art, July 4, 1874, 5–11. Wyman, Morrill. Corporal Punishment in the Public Schools: Progress in School Discipline; Addressed to the Citizens of Cambridge. Cambridge: Press of J. Wilson, 1867. X. Y. Z. “Some Views in Regard to Exhibitions and Examinations.” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, January 1864, 3–7. Youmans, Professor. “Spelling———The Other Side.” The American Educational Monthly, July 1875, 317–20.

Secondary Sources Adams, John R. Edward Everett Hale. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977. Alston, Kal. “So Give Me Love, Love, Love, Crazy Love: Teachers, Sex, and Transference?.” Philosophy of Education (1998): 366–69. Alves, Jaime Olsterman. Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 2009. “Another California Swindle.” Bancroftiana: Published Occasionally by the Friends of the Bancroft Library 72 (1979): 1–2. Barreca, Regina, and Deborah D. Morse. The Erotics of Instruction. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997. Bauer, Dale M. “Indecent Proposals: Teachers in the Movies.” College English 60, no. 3 (1998): 301–17. Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820–70. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Blinderman, Abraham. American Writers on Education Before 1865. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975.

222 • Bibliography Boewe, Charles. “Reflex Action in the Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 26, no. 3 (1954): 303–19. Bouma, Jana A. “Caroline M. Kirkland (1801–1864).” In Writers of the American Renaissance: An A-to-Z Guide, edited by Denise D. Knight, 227–34. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. Brashear, Lucy. “The Novels of Mary Jane Holmes: Education for Wifehood.” In Nineteenth- Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World, edited by Rhoda B. Nathan, 19–25. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986. Brehm, Victoria. “Castle Somewhere: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Reconstructed Great Lakes.” In Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, edited by Victoria Brehm, 99–110. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Britzman, Deborah P. “Cultural Myths in the Making of a Teacher: Biography and Social Structure in Teacher Education.” Harvard Educational Review 56, no. 4 (1986): 442–56. Brodhead, Richard H. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Brown, Clarence A. “Edward Eggleston as a Social Historian.” Illinois Historical Society Journal 54 (1962): 405–18. Buchanan, Lindal. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Butchart, Ronald E. Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862–1875. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Carp, E. Wayne. “Introduction: A Historical Overview of American Adoption.” In Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives, edited by E. Wayne Carp, 1–26. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Carpan, Carolyn. Sisters, Schoolgirls, and Sleuths: Girls’ Series Books in America. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009. Cavanagh, Sheila L. Sexing the Teacher: School Sex Scandals and Queer Pedagogies. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007. Chantell, Claire Ann. “‘A Better Guardianship’: Mothers, Surrogates, and Female Education in Domestic Literature, 1790–1860.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000. Cho, Daniel. “Lessons of Love: Psychoanalysis and Teacher-Student Love.” Educational Theory 55, no. 1 (2005): 79–95. Clark, Beverly Lyon. Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys. New York: Garland, 1996. Clifford, Geraldine Joncich. “Daughters into Teachers: Educational and Demographic Influences on the Transformation of Teaching into ‘Women’s Work’ in America.” History of Education Review 12 (1983): 15–28. ———. “Man/Woman/Teacher: Gender, Family and Career in American Educational

Bibliography • 223 History.” In American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, edited by Donald R. Warren, 293–343. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Cochran, Bud T. “The Indianas of Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier School-Master.” Old Northwest: A Journal of Regional Life and Letters 4 (1978): 385–90. Cohen, David K. “Practice and Policy: Notes on the History of Instruction.” In American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, edited by Donald R. Warren, 393– 407. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Cohen, Rosetta M., and Samuel Scheer. The Work of Teachers in America: A Social History Through Stories. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997. Cole, Heather. “‘Intimacy has undoubtedly taken place’: Tales of Student Resistance.” Master’s thesis, San Francisco State University, 2000. Cox, James M. “Tom Sawyer: Performer and Chief Entertainer.” In Readings on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, edited by Katie De Koster, 68–76. San Diego: Greenhaven, 1999. Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education, the National Experience, 1783–1876. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. ———. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876– 1957. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961. Cummins, Amy. “A Common School: Models of Instruction in the United States Common School Movement and the 1850s Literature of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline Lee Hentz, Fanny Fern, and Mary Jane Holmes.” PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2004. ———. “‘The Inexorable Bell’: Fanny Fern’s Concerns with US Education.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 39, no.1 (2006): 14–24. Dalton, Mary M. The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies. New York: Lang, 2004. Damon-Bach, Lucinda L., and Victoria Clements. Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Dank, Barry M., and Joseph S. Fulda. “Forbidden Love: Student-Professor Romances.” Sexuality & Culture 1 (1997): 107–30. Davis, Cynthia J. “The Doctor Is In: Medical Insight, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Elsie Venner.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24, no. 2 (2002): 177–93. Dean, Sharon L. “Constance Woolson’s Southern Sketches.” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 25, no. 3 (1986): 274–83. Delony, Sheila, and Mike Delony. “Professional Paradox: Teachers in Film and Television.” In The Pedagogy of Pop: Theoretical and Practical Strategies for Success, edited by Edward A. Janak and Denise F. Blum, 13–26. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. DuPlessis, Rachel B. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Ehrlich, J. Shoshanna. “You Can Steal her Virginity but Not her Doll: The Nineteenth

224 • Bibliography Century Campaign to Raise the Legal Age of Sexual Consent.” Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender 15 (2009): 229–45. Enoch, Jessica. “A Woman’s Place is in the School: Rhetorics of Gendered Space in Nineteenth-Century America.” College English 70, no. 3 (2008): 275–95. Epstein, Debbie, and Richard Johnson. Schooling Sexualities. Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 1998. Evelev, John. “Picturesque Reform in the New England Village Novel, 1845–1867.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 52, no. 2 (2007): 148–83. Farber, Paul, Eugene F. Provenzo, and Gunilla Holm. Schooling in the Light of Popular Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Fetterley, Judith, and Marjorie Pryse. Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Finkelstein, Barbara. Governing the Young: Teacher Behavior in Popular Primary Schools in Nineteenth-Century United States. New York: Falmer Press, 1989. Fisher, Roy, Ann Harris, and Christine Jarvis. Education in Popular Culture: Telling Tales on Teachers and Learners. New York: Routledge, 2008. Fitts, Deborah. “Una and the Lion: The Feminization of District School-Teaching and its Effects on the Role of Students and Teachers in 19th Century Massachusetts.” In Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective, edited by Barbara Finkelstein, 140–57. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979. Flitcroft, John E. The Novelist of Vermont: A Biographical and Critical Study of Daniel Pierce Thompson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929. Foff, Arthur. “Scholars and Scapegoats.” English Journal 47 (1958): 118–26. Foster, Richard A. The School in American Literature. Baltimore: Warwick and York, 1930. Fowler, Sandra Brandmark. “The Character of the Woman Teacher during her Emergence as a Full-Time Professional in Nineteenth Century America: Stereotypes vs. Personal Histories.” Dissertation, Boston University, 1985. Fuller, Wayne E. The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. ———. “The Teacher in the Country School.” In American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, edited by Donald R. Warren, 98–117. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Gaither, Milton. American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress. New York: Teachers College Press, 2003. ———. Homeschool: An American History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Gallop, Jane. Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Gargano, Elizabeth. Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2008. Gebhard, Caroline. “Constance Fenimore Woolson Rewrites Bret Harte: The Sexual Politics of Intertextuality.” In Critical Essays on Constance Fenimore Woolson, edited by Cheryl B. Torsney, 217–28. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992.

Bibliography • 225 Glenn, Myra C. Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. Grambs, David. Death by Spelling: A Compendium of Tests, Super Tests, and Killer Bees. New York: Perennial Library, 1989. Grant, Gerald, and Christine E. Murray. Teaching in America: The Slow Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Green, Andy. Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France, and the USA. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Green, Nancy. “Female Education and School Competition: 1820–1850.” History of Education Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1978): 129–42. Greene, Maxine. The Public School and the Private Vision: A Search for America in Education and Literature. New York: Random House, 1965. Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Hall, Roger A. Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hendler, Glenn. “Tom Sawyer’s Masculinity.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 49, no. 4 (1993): 33–59. Herbst, Jurgen. And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization in American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Higgins, Chris. “Transference Love from the Couch to the Classroom: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on the Ethics of Teacher-Student Romance.” Philosophy of Education (1998): 357–65. Hill, Hamlin L. “The Composition and Structure of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” In Critical Essays on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, edited by Gary Scharnhorst, 67–78. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993. Hischak, Thomas S. American Literature on Stage and Screen: 525 Works and their Adaptations. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2012. Hodges, Richard E. “In Adam’s Fall: A Brief History of Spelling Instruction in the United States.” In Reading & Writing Instruction in the United States: Historical Trends, edited by H. A. Robinson, 1–7. Newark: International Reading Association, 1977. Hoffman, Nancy. Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1981. Hogan, David. “Modes of Discipline: Affective Individualism and Pedagogical Reform in New England, 1820–1850. American Journal of Education 99, no. 1 (1990): 1–56. Holmes, Madelyn, and Beverly J. Weiss. Lives of Women Public Schoolteachers: Scenes from American Educational History. New York: Garland, 1995. Holt, Jenny. Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2008.

226 • Bibliography hooks, bell. “Passionate Pedagogy: Erotic Student/Faculty Relationships.” Z Magazine, March 1996. ———. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Hutchinson, Stuart. Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Isenberg, Jane. Going by the Book: The Role of Popular Classroom Chronicles in the Professional Development of Teachers. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994. Jacobs, Denise Kay. “East Meets Midwest in Caroline Kirkland’s Western Clearings.” Midamerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature 28 (2001): 87–97. Jagodzinksi, Jan. “Is There an Ethics of Diabolical Evil? Sex Scandals, Family Romance, and Love in the School & Academy.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 25, no. 5–6 (2006): 335–62. Johannsen, Robert W. “Literature and History: The Early Novels of Edward Eggleston.” Indiana Magazine of History 48 (1952): 37–54. Johnson, Tara S. From Teacher to Lover: Sex Scandals in the Classroom. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Jones, Jacqueline. “Women who were more than Men: Sex and Status in Freedmen’s Teaching.” History of Education Quarterly. 19, no. 1 (1979): 47–59. ———. Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Joseph, Pamela B., and Gail E. Burnaford. Images of Schoolteachers in America. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2001. Kabelac, Karl. “C. W. Bardeen.” In American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638–1889: Part 1: A–M, 39. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 1986. Kaestle, Carl F. Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780– 1860. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Kaplan, Amy. “Nation, Region, Empire.” In The Columbia History of the American Novel, edited by Emory Elliot, 240–66. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Katz, Michael B. The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968. ———. “The Origins of Public Education: A Reassessment.” In The Social History of American Education, edited by B. E. McClellan and William J. Reese, 91–118. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Kaufman, Polly W. Women Teachers on the Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Kelley, Mary. “Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867).” Legacy 6, no. 2 (1989): 43–50. Kendall, Joshua C. The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010.

Bibliography • 227 Keroes, Jo. Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Kett, Joseph F. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Kilmer, Paulette D. “Youth’s Companion.” In Encyclopedia of American Journalism, edited by Stephen L. Vaughn, 610. New York: Routledge, 2008. Kincaid, James R. Child-loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Knoles, Lucia Z. “Daniel Pierce Thompson.” In Nineteenth-Century American Fiction Writers, edited by Kent P. Ljungquist, 265–70. Detroit: Gale, 1999. Koistinen-Harris, Janice H. Social Reform, Taste, and the Construction of Virtue in American Literature, 1870–1910. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Langston, Camille A. “Caroline M. Kirkland.” In Antebellum Writers in New York: Second Series, edited by Kent P. Ljungquist, 215–18. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Larsen, Marianne A. The Making and Shaping of the Victorian Teacher: A Comparative New Cultural History. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Liston, Daniel P., and James W. Garrison. Teaching, Learning, and Loving: Reclaiming Passion in Educational Practice. New York: Routledge Falmer, 2004. Logan, Lisa. “Mary Jane Hawes Holmes (1825–1907).” In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Denise D. Knight and Emmanuel S. Nelson, 231–35. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Lund, Michael. America’s Continuing Story: An Introduction to Serial Fiction, 1850– 1900. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Lupold, Harry Forrest. “Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Genre of Regional Fiction.” Ohioana Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1986): 132–36. Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Machor, James L. “Fiction and Informed Reading in Early Nineteenth-Century America.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 47, no. 3 (1992): 320–48. Maguire, James. American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds: The Lives of Five Top Spellers As They Compete for Glory and Fame. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006. Maher, Jennifer. “Hot for Teacher: Rewriting the Erotics of Pedagogy.” Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture 24 (2004): 42–48. Manning, John. “Discipline in the Good Old Days.” In Corporal Punishment in American Education: Readings in History, Practice, and Alternatives, edited by Irwin A. Hyman and James H. Wise, 50–61. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979. Martin, Jay. Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865–1914. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967. McClellan, B. Edward. Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Teachers College Press, 1999.

228 • Bibliography McGuire, Barbara J. “Mary Jane Holmes.” In American Women Prose Writers, 1870– 1920, edited by Sharon M. Harris, Heidi L. M. Jacobs, and Jennifer Putzi, 204–10. Detroit: Gale, 2000. McWilliam, Erica. “Touchy Subjects: A Risky Inquiry into Pedagogical Pleasure.” British Educational Research Journal 22, no. 3 (1996): 305–17. Merish, Lori. “Story Papers.” In US Popular Print Culture, 1860–1920, edited by Christine Bold, 23–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Messent, Peter. “Discipline and Punishment in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Journal of American Studies 32, no. 2 (1998): 219–35. Mexal, Stephen J. Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Miles, Albert John. “The Image of the Teacher in the Nineteenth Century American Novel.” PhD diss., Temple University, 1977. Miller, Errol. The Prophet & the Virgin: The Masculine and Feminine Roots of Teaching. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2003. Morris, Robert C. Reading, ‘riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Mott, Frank L. A History of American Magazines: 1850–1865. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. Musgrave, P. W. From Brown to Bunter: The Life and Death of the School Story. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Nasaw, David. Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Nelson, Claudia. Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850–1929. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Osborne, William S. Caroline M. Kirkland. New York: Twayne, 1972. Parille, Ken. Boys at Home: Discipline, Masculinity, and “the Boy-Problem” in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Peck, Elizabeth G. “Tom Sawyer: Character in Search of an Audience.” American Transcendental Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1988): 223–36. Perlmann, Joel, and Robert A. Margo. Women’s Work? American Schoolteachers, 1650–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Perrin, David J. “Mark Twain, John Dewey, and the Image of the Teacher: A Case for the Interpretive Study of Narratives within Educational Discourse.” PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 2009. Pfitzer, Gregory M. Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840–1920. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Preskill, Stephen, and Robin S. Jacobvitz. Stories of Teaching: A Foundation for Educational Renewal. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill, 2001. Preston, Jo Anne. “Domestic Ideology, School Reformers, and Female Teachers:

Bibliography • 229 Schoolteaching Becomes Women’s Work in Nineteenth-Century New England.” The New England Quarterly 66, no. 4 (1993): 531–51. ———. “Female Aspiration and Male Ideology: School-Teaching in Nineteenth-Century New England.” Current Issues in Women’s History (1989): 171–82. Randel, William P. Edward Eggleston. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1963. Rawley, James A. “Edward Eggleston: Historian.” Indiana Magazine of History 40 (1944): 341–52. Ray, Angela G. The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005. Read, Allen Walker. “The Spelling Bee: A Linguistic Institution of the American Folk.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 56, no. 2 (1941): 495–512. Reese, William J. America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind”. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. ———. Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Robbins, Sarah. “‘The Future Good and Great of Our Land’: Republican Mothers, Female Authors, and Domesticated Literacy in Antebellum New England.” New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters 75, no. 4 (2002): 562–91. ———. Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. Rosenfeld, Stuart A., and Jonathan P. Sher. “The Urbanization of Rural Schools, 1840–1970.” In Education in Rural America: A Reassessment of Conventional Wisdom, edited by Jonathan P. Sher, 11–40. Boulder: Westview Press, 1977. Rothman, Ellen K. Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Rotundo, E. Anthony. “Boy Culture: Middle-Class Boyhood in Nineteenth-Century America.” In Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, edited by Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, 15–36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Rousmaniere, Kate. “Good Teachers Are Born, Not Made: Self-Regulation in the Work of Nineteenth-Century American Women Teachers.” In Discipline, Moral Regulation, and Schooling: A Social History, edited by Kate Rousmaniere, Kari Dehli, and Ning de Coninck-Smith, 117–33. New York: Garland, 1997. Rury, John L. Education and Social Change: Themes in the History of American Schooling. Mahwah: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2009. Sánchez, María C. Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008. Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

230 • Bibliography Scharnhorst, Gary. Bret Harte. New York: Twayne, 1992. ———. Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. ———. Critical Essays on the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993. Schmidt, Peter. Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865–1920. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Schwartz, J. Brian. “The Teacher, the Student and Other Stories: Images of Schools in Contemporary American Short Fiction.” PhD diss., New York University, 2007. Seelye, John. “What’s In A Name: Sounding the Depths of Tom Sawyer.” Sewanee Review 90, no. 3 (1982): 408–29. Selcer, Richard F. Civil War America, 1850 to 1875. New York: Facts On File, 2006. Shockley, Martin Staples. “The Teacher in American Literature.” South Central Bulletin 31, no. 4 (1971): 218–20. Sidorkin, Alexander M. Learning Relations: Impure Education, Deschooled Schools, and Dialogue with Evil. New York: P. Lang, 2002. Sikes, Pat. “Scandalous stories and dangerous liaisons: when female pupils and male teachers fall in love.” Sex Education 6, no. 3 (2006): 265–80. Sims, Sue, and Hilary Clare. The Encyclopaedia of Girls’ School Stories. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Singley, Carol J. Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Soltow, Lee, and Edward Stevens. The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood and the Place of American Poetry, 1865– 1917. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005. Spearman, Mindy. “The Reading Circle Movement in Texas.” American Educational History Journal 34, no. 1 (2007): 23–38. Spencer, Stacy L. “Legacy Profile: Caroline Kirkland (1801–1864).” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 8, no. 2 (1992): 133–40. Stevens, J. David. “‘She War a Woman’: Family Roles, Gender, and Sexuality in Bret Harte’s Western Fiction.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 69, no. 3 (1997): 571–93. Stillwaggon, James. “Don’t Stand So Close to Me: Relational Distance between Teachers and Students.” Philosophy of Education (2006): 199–226. ———. “Mind the (Love) Gap: Love and Negativity in Educational Thought.” Philosophy of Education (2005): 175–81. Sugg, Redding S. Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978. Tebbel, John W. The American Magazine: A Compact History. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969.

Bibliography • 231 Tebbel, John W., and Mary E. Zuckerman. The Magazine in America, 1741–1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Theobald, Paul. “Country School Curriculum and Governance: The One-Room School Experience in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest.” American Journal of Education 101, no. 2 (1993): 116–39. Thompson, Eleanor W. Education for Ladies, 1830–1860: Ideas on Education in Magazines for Women. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1947. Tierney, John. “The Perils of Being a Male Teacher at an All-Girls School.” The Atlantic, March 28, 2013. Tompkins, Jane P. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790– 1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Tribunella, Eric L. “Tom Brown and the Schoolboy Crush: Boyhood Desire, Hero Worship, and the Boys’ School Story.” In The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, edited by Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone, 455–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Tyack, David B., and Elisabeth Hansot. Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Underwood, Gary N. “Toward a Reassessment of Edward Eggleston’s Literary Dialects.” Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 28, no. 4 (1974): 109–20. Urban, Wayne J. “Teacher Activism.” In American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, edited by Donald R. Warren, 190–210. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Van Dette, Emily. “‘It Should Be a Family Thing’: Family, Nation, and Republicanism in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale and The Linwoods.” American Transcendental Quarterly 19, no.1 (2005): 51–74. Vaninskaya, Anna. “‘It Was a Silly System’: Writers and Schools, 1870–1939.” The Modern Language Review 105, no. 4 (2010): 952–75. Venezsky, Richard L. “From Webster to Rice to Roosevelt: The Formative Years for Spelling Instruction and Spelling Reform in the U.S.A.” In Cognitive Processes in Spelling, edited by Uta Frith, 9–32. London: Academic Press, 1980. Vinovskis, Maris A. “Family and Schooling in Colonial and Nineteenth-Century America.” Journal of Family History 12, no. 1 (1987): 19–37. Waller, Willard. The Sociology of Teaching. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961. Watney, Simon. “School’s Out.” In Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss, 387–401. New York: Routledge, 1991. Weaver, Heather. “Beyond Apples and Ice Cream: The Teacher-Student Relationship as Cinematic Romance, 1909–1939.” Film & History 39, no. 1 (2009): 9–20. Weber, Sandra, and Claudia Mitchell. That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Like a Teacher!: Interrogating Images and Identity in Popular Culture. London: Falmer Press, 1995. Weiler, Kathleen. Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850–1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

232 • Bibliography Weinstein, Cindy. Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Welter, Rush. American Writings on Popular Education: The Nineteenth Century. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. West, Michael. Transcendental Wordplay: America’s Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. Whitsitt, Sam. “The Spelling Bee: What Makes it an American Institution?” The Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 4 (2010): 881–97. Williams, Heather A. Self-taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Wolford, Thorp L. “Edward Eggleston: Evolution of a Historian.” Indiana Magazine of History 63 (1967): 17–48. Wyman, Andrea. Rural Women Teachers in the United States: A Sourcebook. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997. Yarington, Earl F. The Portrayal of Woman’s Sentimental Power in American Domestic Fiction: The Novels of Mary Jane Holmes, 1825–1907. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Zimmerman, Jonathan. Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Index

academies, 7–8, 14, 95–97, 106–7, 109–10 adoption: of students, 1–2, 17–19, 141–71, 175, 177–78 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain): 20–22, 35–36, 48, 51–52 African Americans: education of, 8, 14, 157–58, 162–70 American Educational Monthly, 14–15, 52–53 American Journal of Education, 4–5, 71 Arthur, Timothy Shay, 95–96 assessment, 13, 22–27, 36–37, 46–47, 177–78 Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine, 14–15, 44–45, 68–69, 100–101 Bardeen, C.W., 18, 40, 48–50, 55–56, 69, 91, 112, 115–17, 124–33, 172–73 “Barred In” (Saxon), 67 barring out: definition of, 18, 70–71; representations in fiction, 71–77, 82–84, 89, 175–76. See also violence: school as a site of Bierstadt, O.A., 115–16 “big boys,” 1–2, 58–59, 62–67, 70–76, 80–86 boarding around. See teachers: as outsiders boarding schools, 7–8, 14, 95–97, 106–7 Burton, Warren, 17–18, 27, 31–34, 55, 63, 137–39, 159 Butterworth, Hezekiah, 68–69, 103–4,

206n37 Cape Cod Folks (Greene), 46–47 Catholics, 8–9, 141, 201n11 centralization. See consolidation: of rural schools; supervision: of schools childhood: definitions of, 8–9, 112–13, 139–42, 156–57, 166–67, 172–73 child-readers, 15–16, 50–51, 64–65, 67, 71, 114–15 Christian Union, 14–15, 42–43 citizenship: schooling as training for, 2–3, 9–10, 13, 22–23, 60–65, 68–74, 86–87 class, 14, 16–18, 21–22, 27–28, 38, 53, 57, 137, 141–42, 145, 155–56, 159–60, 170; in relation to taste, 20–22, 25–26, 29– 35, 37–45, 47–50, 53, 55–56, 80, 95–96, 106–7, 158–59; and social mobility, 17–18, 21–22, 24–28, 30–31, 33–34, 38–39, 42–46, 50–52, 54, 98, 101, 106, 109–110, 112, 114, 116–17, 121–22, 127–29, 149–152, 156, 161 classroom management. See school government coeducation, 94–97, 133 Commissioner Hume (Bardeen), 40, 48–50, 112, 115–16, 124 common school: definition of, 1–2, 8 common school narrative: definition of, 1–4, 6–7, 13–14, 17; sources of, 14–16 common school reform: criticisms of, 11– 13, 25–27, 35–36, 44–45, 51–52, 54–55,

234 • Index 59–61, 64–65, 67–73, 79–81, 86–89, 116–18, 121–22, 127–29, 131–33, 138– 42, 152–62, 164–65, 167–71, 176–77; history of, 2–3, 7–13, 22–27, 31, 52–55, 59–62, 80–81, 86, 93–98, 105, 107–8, 110, 132, 135–37, 159–160, 162–163, 172–73, 176–77 community bonding, 8–9, 11–13, 17–18, 22–27, 34–38, 40–41, 44–45, 47, 50–57, 59–60, 86–87 community control, 7–8, 11–13, 41–42, 60–64, 69–70, 73–78, 80–81, 83–87, 89, 153–54, 168–69, 177–78 composition, 20–22, 29–31, 45–47, 103, 126–27, 130–31, 191n37 Connecticut Common School Journal, 23–25, 42, 54, 137 consolidation: of rural schools, 8–10, 172. See also supervision: of schools corporal punishment, 9–13, 20, 58–68, 70–72, 76, 81–83, 112. See also discipline; school government courtship: norms of, 92, 99–133, 145–46 Crane, Stephen, 13–14, 47–48, 172–73 Cressy (Harte), 112–16, 206–7n38 cultural capital, 22–23, 25–31, 45, 48–50, 53–54, 56–57 curriculum, 9–10, 17–18, 21–22, 24–27, 29–35, 37–51, 57, 95–96, 103, 106–7. See also pedagogy declamation, 20, 22, 24, 32–34, 45–50 discipline, 9–13, 20, 58–69, 71–77, 80–84, 95, 97–99, 112, 116–17, 124, 137–39; and gender, 62–68, 72–75, 80, 83–84, 97–99, 137–38. See also corporal punishment; moral suasion; school government The District School as It Was (Burton), 17–18, 27, 31–36, 55, 63, 137–39, 159 “Our District Schoolmaster” (MacDonald), 100–1, 103–4 district schools, 7–10 The Dukesborough Tales. See Richard Malcolm Johnston educational eroticism. See romance: with students; sexual desire: school as a site of Eggleston, Edward, 1–2, 5–6, 18, 52–56,

78–88, 109–10, 132–33, 174–76, 206n37 Elsie Venner (Holmes), 62–64, 92, 112–16 Ernest Linwood (Hentz), 112, 115–16, 143–44, 152–54 exhibitions: controversies regarding, 21, 23–27, 29; functions of, 22–29, 36–37, 39–42, 47, 50–52, 57; representations in fiction, 20–22, 26–30, 32–34, 36–53, 76–77, 126–27, 175, 177–78 female education: anxieties about, 18, 20–21, 52–53, 55, 92–98, 103–7, 109–33. See also coeducation feminization of teaching, 135–38, 140–41, 152–54, 172–73. See also mother-teacher; schoolmistresses Fern, Fanny (Sara Payson Willis Parton), 35, 97–99, 142–43, 152–54 Flag of Our Union, 14–16, 41–42 freedmen’s schooling, 14, 157–58, 162–70 funding: of schools, 2–3, 7–11 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 14–15, 67, 102–3 “The Goosepond School” (Johnston), 58–60 Hale, Edward Everett, 18–19, 157–58, 162–70 Hale, Sarah Josepha, 138–39. See also Godey’s Lady’s Book Harte, Bret, 16, 18–19, 44–45, 112–16, 144–58 Hentz, Caroline Lee, 112, 115–16, 142–44, 152–54 Holmes, Mary Jane, 18, 39–40, 44–45, 114–15, 117–25, 191n37 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 62–64, 92, 112–16 home: relationship with the school, 67, 92, 101–2, 115–16, 133, 135–37, 140–42, 153–55, 162–65, 167, 169–71 “A Hoosier Idyl” (Jones), 47 The Hoosier Schoolboy (Eggleston), 104 The Hoosier Schoolmaster (Eggleston), 1–2, 18, 52–57, 78–88, 132–33, 174–76, 192n58, 206n37 humor: use in the common school narrative, 1–2, 15–16, 20–21, 31–37, 40–41, 48–49, 51–52, 54, 81, 85–86, 98–99, 112–13, 138–39

Index • 235 “The Idyl of Red Gulch” (Harte), 155–57 immigration, 8–9, 141, 157–62 Irving, Washington, 63, 92, 98–99, 112–14, 116–17, 174–75 Johnston, Richard Malcolm, 38–40, 45–47, 58–60, 99–104 Kirkland, Caroline, 17–18, 27, 34–38, 51–52, 111, 115–17 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Irving), 92, 98–99, 112–14, 116–17, 174–75 “Libbie May, The Young School Teacher” (Elliot), 42 local control. See community control Locke Amsden (Thompson), 4, 18, 39–41, 103, 105–10, 112, 124, 174–76 Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 73–74 MacDonald, Anna, 100–1, 103–4 Maine Farmer, 14–15, 50 Mann, Horace, 2, 22, 26–27, 52–53, 60–61, 66–68, 70–71, 98, 105–6, 135–36, 155. See also common school reform Mann, Mary Peabody, 137, 139–40 Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, 24–25, 95–96, 140–41 Meadow Brook (Holmes), 39–40, 44–45 Midwest: history of schools in, 7–8, 10, 13–14, 80–81, 86, 136; representations in common school narratives, 1, 27, 34–38, 47, 53–56, 78–88, 104, 111, 115–17, 158–62, 192n58 “M’liss” (Harte), 18–19, 44–45, 144–55 morality: and education, 2–3, 9–10, 15, 24–25, 27–28, 40–42, 44–45, 84–85, 96, 108–9, 112–13, 120–24, 127–28, 130–33, 137, 160–63, 167, 169–70, 173 moral suasion, 11–13, 60–61, 64–69, 130, 135–36. See also discipline; mother-teacher; school government mother-teacher: definition of, 135–37; representations in fiction, 66–67, 92, 137–42, 153–71. See also feminization of teaching Mrs. Merriam’s Scholars (Hale), 19, 157–58, 162–70

“My School at Pinhook” (Adkins), 102–3 national belonging, 8–9, 18, 59–61, 70–74, 177–78. See also citizenship: schooling as training for; republic: concerns about the fragility of National Era, 14–15, 138–39 Native Americans, 8, 103 New England. See Northeast A New-England Tale (Sedgwick), 17–18, 27–31, 126–27 A New Home—Who’ll Follow? (Kirkland), 111, 115–17 Northeast: history of schools in, 7–8, 10, 13–14, 136; representations in common school narratives, 27–41, 46–50, 55, 62–65, 98–99, 103, 105–10, 112–17, 124–33, 137–38 old-field schools, 7–8, 14 “The Old Five” (Woolson), 18–19, 157–62, 169–70, 188n52 “Old Friends and New” (Johnston), 38–40, 45–47, 99–104 The Old Log Schoolhouse (Clark), 56, 71–72, 75–76, 112 oratory. See declamation “Our School Exhibition” (Harbour), 40–41 “Our School Teachers,” 65–67, 135–36 Overland Monthly, 14–16, 45–46, 67–68, 74–75 oversight: of schools. See supervision: of schools parents. See adoption: of students; community control; home: relationship with the school patriotism. See national belonging patronage, 156–58, 165–68 “Patty Dree, Schoolmarm” (Neall), 67–68, 135–36 pedagogy, 9–13, 20, 32, 41–44, 47, 52–53, 76–77, 172–76. See also curriculum pedophilia, 92–94, 148–49, 200–201n7 “Pete,” 35, 45–46 Pictures of Life in England and America (Dudley), 53–56 “The Prize of Upper Nineveh” (McCormick), 40, 42–46, 49–50

236 • Index Progressivism, 13–14, 172 “Putting in the Summer Professionally” (Richardson), 74–75 race: and education, 8, 14, 19, 45–46, 103, 137, 141–42, 157–58, 162–70 reader response, 4–6, 27–28, 31–32, 34, 79, 85–86, 105–6, 124, 148, 176, 198n58. See also schooling readers realism, 1–2, 79, 87–88 The Red Shanty Boys (Brown), 48–49, 54–55, 71–72, 76, 112 regionalism, 1–2, 6, 79, 157–58, 197n34 republic: concerns about the fragility of, 8–9, 60–61, 67–71 Roderick Hume (Bardeen), 18, 69, 91, 117, 124–33, 172–73 romance: between teacher and student, 11, 13, 17–18, 63, 71–72, 76, 81, 91–133, 142–43, 145–52, 175, 177–78, 197n29; school as a site of, 1–2, 28, 30–31, 35– 38, 42–44, 55–56, 137–38, 151–52, 155, 160–61. See also sexual desire: school as site of Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 5–6, 92–93, 174 school government, 18, 58–69, 71–78, 80–87, 97–99. See also discipline; moral suasion schoolmasters: representations in fiction, 20, 32–42, 45–46, 53–56, 58–60, 62–66, 71–76, 79–88, 91–92, 97–133, 135, 140–54, 156–57, 170–71 The Schoolmaster in Literature (Skinner), 5–6, 173–76 “The Schoolmaster’s Progress” (Kirkland), 17–18, 27, 34–38, 51–52 schoolmistresses: representations in fiction, 10, 18–19, 42–44, 46–47, 65–69, 91–92, 115–16, 125–32, 135, 137–42, 154–71, 200n2. See also feminization: of teaching; mother-teacher “The School in Perrin:— Or,— The New Teacher” (Robinson), 41–42, 76–77 schooling readers: definition of, 3–7, 17, 176; examples of, 21–22, 27–28, 30–34, 41–44, 49–50, 66, 68–69, 74–79, 87–88, 100–6, 108–11, 113–18, 120–28, 131–33,

138–39, 143, 145–46, 152, 159, 161–65, 169–70, 173–75, 177–78 school stories: contemporary, 3–4, 92–94, 172–73, 186n18; Victorian, 3–4, 174, 186n18. See also common school narrative Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 17–18, 27–31, 126–27 sensationalism, 123–24, 131–33, 152–53 sentimentalism, 1–2, 6, 15, 79, 94, 99–100, 104–5, 108–9, 113–14, 116–19, 122–28, 130–33, 150, 153–56, 159–61, 166–67, 172 sex scandals: in schools, 92–94. See also pedophilia; romance: between teacher and student; sexual desire: school as a site of sexual desire: school as a site of, 18, 91–93, 95–97, 99–104, 108–9, 111–18, 120–25, 127–31, 133, 142–43, 145–47, 156 sexual harassment, 92–94, 200–201n7 “Shadows and Sunbeams” (Fern), 143, 145–46, 151–55 “Shasta Lilies” (Shinn), 56 Sketches of American Character (Hale), 137–39 Skinner, Hubert M., 173–76. See also The Schoolmaster in Literature social mobility. See class: and social mobility South: history of schools in, 7–8, 10, 14, 17, 163–65; representations in common school narratives, 38–40, 45–47, 58–59, 73–74, 99–104, 112, 114–24, 143–44, 162–70 spelling bees, 1–2, 17–18, 20, 22–23, 35–36, 45–46, 51–57, 177–78 subscription schools, 14, 28 supervision: of schools, 9–11, 35, 41–45, 60, 63–64, 66–69, 71–72, 80–81, 89, 109–10, 112, 124–35, 172 taxes. See funding: of schools teacher reading circle movement, 173–76 “The Teacher’s Trial and Reward” (Irving), 138–41 teachers: examinations of, 34–35, 80, 192n53; as outsiders, 60, 62–64, 69–70, 74–77, 80–89, 158–59; quality of, 2–3,

Index • 237 58–90, 104, 112–13, 142–43, 147, 168– 69, 175, 177–78

7–8, 9–11, 34–35, 40, 42–44, 62–64, 68– 69, 71–72, 76, 80–81, 98, 104–5, 109–11, 173–74; turnover of, 7–8, 10, 39, 62–67, 70, 86–87, 98, 104–6, 149–50. See also schoolmasters; schoolmistresses Tempest and Sunshine (Holmes), 114–15, 117–25, 191n37 Thompson, Daniel Pierce, 18, 39–40, 103, 105–10, 112, 124, 174–76 transference, 92–93, 114–15, 200–201n7 “The Turnout” (Longstreet), 73–74 turnover. See teachers: turnover of Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 16, 20–22, 48 “The Two Suitors” (Bierstadt), 115–16

West: representations in common school narratives, 45–52, 67–68, 74–75, 103, 112–17, 144–57 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 55, 92 “Winter Nights” (Taylor), 54–56 women of fashion, 18, 29–30, 95–96, 106–7, 109–10, 112–14, 118, 121–25, 127–29, 131, 133 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 18–19, 157–62, 169–70, 172–73, 188n52 “The Work on Red Mountain” (Harte). See M’liss

urban schools, 14, 159–60, 172–73, 188n52 violence: school as a site of, 1–2, 13, 17–18,

Youth’s Companion, 14–15, 40–42, 64–65, 114–15