Fanny Fern
Discussion Questions and Commentary (BAAL)
Questions:
1.) Fern's popularity provides a good starting point for reading and discussing the sketches in this section, which take on subjects that would have been controversial in her time, such as the role of a wife, responsibility to the poor, prostitution, the treatment of the mentally ill, and prison reform. Consider how cultural figures (such as Oprah, Dr. Phil, etc.) introduce difficult subjects today, and consider also to what extent those techniques are apparent in Fern's work.
2.) Might such techniques emerge most readily if we read Fern's work aloud, the way it was read by families in the evenings before the age of television?
3.) Make two lists:
the first containing the qualities of Fern's writing or narrative persona that conform to the then-dominant cultural ideas about women.
the second delineating the ways that her writing seems to refute those same dominant cultural ideas.
Based on these two lists, how does Fern negotiate a relationship with her audience?
4.) Discuss the ways that Fern's narrative voice upholds, challenges, or complicates the ideal of the True Woman.
Note: "True Woman" was a term coined by historian Barbara Welter to describe a nineteenth-century ideal circulated in print culture, including gift and guide books, periodicals, household manuals, and novels. According to Welter, the "Cult of True Womanhood" espoused the values of purity, Christian piety, submissiveness, and domesticity. This idealized value system assumed what historians have called separate spheres, the notion that women and men occupied different spaces in culture. That is, men operated in the public sphere of the world and market, while women were expected to exert their influence from the private sphere of the home.
5.) Identify one or more rhetorical strategies that Fern uses to connect with her audience and to encourage them to adopt her viewpoint.
6.) Certainly, many of Fern's readers were men. Explain how she addresses that audience as she calls for reform of women's roles and treatment.
7.) Do you agree with this assertion:
"Fern's able and competent voice evokes comparisons to Emerson's charge to Americans to be self-reliant"?
8.) How does Fern compare to Margaret Fuller and Harriet Jacobs, from the "Era of Reform" section?
9.) Margaret Fuller writes in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, "A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body." How do Fern's sketches respond to this statement?
10.) With Fern's command of narrative and the short sketch, how does she compare to each of the fiction writers we've read so far?
11.) Consider the following assertion:
Fern's discussions of the role of women are in marked contrast to those of Hawthorne, whose women bear the burden of men's mistakes, and Poe, whose women serve as idealized creatures against which his powerful and misguided narrators construct or unravel their senses of self.
12.) Fern's writing is certainly grounded in realism, and she is often thought of a "precursor" to the "literary realism" following the Civil War. But in what ways might Fern's writing be considered "romantic" literature?
13.) Fern was one of the first women to praise Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which scandalized much of the country. What values does her work espouse that you find in Whitman?
Commentary:
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