Class Summary for May 2nd, 2008

Hello all!

I'm sure you're all hard at work on your outlines, so I'll just give a brief recap of Friday's class and try not to take up to much of your time!

We finished our discussion of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's works, and consequently the entire Washington Irving Packet. We are expected to read Poe for a class discussion on Monday. After Poe will be Emerson, then Whitman, and lastly the supplemental packet of Gothic readings. (If you were not in class on Friday when we were given the new packet, see Laz for an extra copy.)

Discussion began with a review of The Jewish Cemetery at Newport. Ian mentioned that Newport had one of the oldest and largest Jewish populations in America. Though they were a majority, the Jewish people were still treated as outsiders and suffered prejudice in their own community. It seemed to Longfellow that little had changed since the first Jewish settlers - Alavares and Rivera - had first arrived in the New World in the 1650s. Throughout history, Jewish populations have suffered horrendous torture. It's natural to lament the innocent lives lost, and become furious that an entire group of people was treated so cruelly, but Longfellow warns not to get too caught up in emotions or to live life looking backwards. After all, "dead nations never rise again." Sure, we can look back to history to learn from our past and to try not to repeat the same mistakes, but dwelling on actions of the past is practically a waste of time and energy. Things can never be brought back to the way they once were.

Then, we moved on to The Slave's Dream. When reading it for the first time, we immediately recognized the romantic style. Longfellow's slave character elevates imaginative dreams over harsh reality. But after we read the poem through a second time with a more critical eye, we realized how stereotypical Longfellow was in his depiction of the slave. He assuredly had good intentions when he wrote the poem, but he comes off as being slightly racist. Granted, he was writing out oh his own time period, but he writes that the slave's dream was about his homeland in Africa. Longfellow describes visions of blood-red flamingos, roaring lions, and screaming hyenas, when he himself knew nothing about the continent! Longfellow had never personally traveled to Africa nor had he studied it. All he knew about Africa came from a basic description, from a book or perhaps from an account of another person who had traveled there. It's quite stereotypical to assume that a slave would dream about his homeland in Niger. In reality, the slave was probably born in America and had never seen Africa. He was probably quite used to the American lifestyle and would not want to endure the arduous journey back across the ocean to Africa. Abolitionists of Longfellow's era abhorred this poem, though it did agree with a separate abolitionist movement to return all of the former slaves to Africa instead of granting them full citizenship in America.

We ended with a short critique of A Psalm of Life. The bell rang before we got a chance to finish, but by then we were pretty much through with Longfellow.

See you in class on Monday, fellow pupils. Good luck to all who are taking the AP Euro final!
-Ashley