Reading and the Material World

Several years ago, I had the privilege of participating in a Folger seminar entitled “Accessorizing the Renaissance,” and since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the material culture of the early modern period, my primary field.  I’ve also been thinking about how to teach students about the material world in relation to reading – and about why it’s important and relevant to the study of literature.

I wish that I had impressive sewing skills or cooking skills so that I could make things for my students to try on and try out; and I wish I wasn’t short on money, so I could take my students to London to actually see the material space of the city. We have a number of places in the area that I would like to take advantage of: the outer banks and Roanoke Island, St. Luke’s Church in Smithfield, Virginia, and the Harriet Jacobs sites in Edenton, North Carolina. As of now, I’ve yet to find the time to prepare such a trip, and I don’t always have the relevant literature to teach in my classes.  And – like many of us – my workload outpaces my imagination. But in my most recent Introduction to Literary Studies classes, I hit upon a plan to make the material world relevant to my students, a plan that took advantage of the resources in our small, historic town: We met one day in the local historic cemetery.

We prepared for this trip by talking about how we can read material objects much the way that we can read texts: material objects, particularly ornamental ones, can show us a lot about the attitudes and lives of the people who lived with them.  We can do this with clothing – I’ve used changes in women’s dress to introduce new periods of literature. We can do this with architecture – I often show students Baroque and Rococo architecture when we talk about eighteenth-century literature.  And we can do this with tombstones.

I asked the students to read a tombstone from the nineteenth century against an Emily Dickinson poem to show nineteenth-century attitudes about death.  It was a difficult project, because while the students wanted to talk about what the tombs said about life and what they said about the families that erected them, the assignment also forced them to stretch their idea of what reading is and what the material world shows us.

As I think about revising the project to better prepare the students next time, I’m realizing that we not only need to spend some time talking about how material objects can help us understand attitudes and worldviews, but we also need to look at pictures of different types of graves to understand other possibilities.  We could look at photos of the Moravian graves in old Winston-Salem – those graves are flat against the earth, suggesting the humility and specific piety of the people.  We could look at photos of some of the particularly ornate graves in places like Hollywood cemetery in Richmond and Graceland cemetery in Chicago – those graves are ostentatious, and the treatment of a cemetery as a center for gardening and architecture, for walks and picnics, suggests a different relationship to death than most of us have in the twenty-first century.  We could look at the uniformity of Arlington and discuss why it’s important to denote military service through the shape of a tombstone.

The idea is to emphasize that literature does not exist in a vacuum: Authors lived (and live) in the physical world just as much as readers do.  The material realities of their lives – be it through the cultural influences of the architecture, or through the modes of production – affected what the authors wrote about and how they wrote.  And those material realities affect our understanding.  It’s hard in some ways to teach students in Florida what life was like for the characters in My Antonia; and it can be difficult to explain to students in the Midwest about the harshness of the ocean in “The Open Boat.”  An easy solution is to show pictures or video, but those don’t enhance our understanding the same way that physically experiencing something does. And while we cannot constantly take field trips to far-flung places, we can take advantage of what we have around us.  For most of us – since we’re already stretching the reading list beyond our primary research – Introduction to Literature or Literary Studies courses are the best places to do this.

What have you done in your classroom to emphasize that literature does not exist in a vacuum and to introduce students to the material cultures of the authors you assign?