Syllabus Overview

Download the peer-reviewed syllabus:  PDF  |  Word

“Women of the Nineteenth Century” is a course developed for “Encountering Intercultural Literatures,” one of three gateway-courses in the English department in Seattle University, a Jesuit liberal arts college. The “Encountering Literature” series (American, British, Intercultural) is targeted at sophomore students to teach close reading skills and to develop their understanding of literary studies and historicism for their successful completion of the major. “Encountering Intercultural Literatures” specifically focuses on the role that intersections among race, gender, sexuality, class, and/or national or global history play in the production and reception of literary texts.

This course was adapted from Ryan D. Fong’s syllabus for his course on “Nineteenth-Century Women’s Literature: Undisciplining White Feminism.” He generously shared the syllabus with me after NAVSA 2023 when I first heard about the course. I have adapted Fong’s tripartite structure of reading Jane Eyre’s three books in conversation with different racial and colonial contexts while adapting it to my specific needs of teaching a lower-level introductory class. The course focuses on close reading as methodology, identification and critique of genres (bildungsroman, autobiography and memoir, epistolary novel, dream vision, and speeches among others), mediation of women’s voices, and the limitations of colonial archives. 

One of the main critical frameworks in constructing this syllabus for me was to undiscipline by undoing what Sylvia Wynter has termed the “overrepresentation” of the bourgeois Western Man “as if it were the human itself” (260). I wanted students to understand that the construction of terms such as Human are just that, a construction, “the product of a particular epistemology, yet it appears to be (and is accepted as) a naturally independent entity existing in the world” (Mignolo 108). As this is an introductory class, I don’t assign theoretical readings, but by formulating Jane Eyre as a white bourgeois woman implicated and complicit in the workings of the British empire enables the understanding of the how the production of the European self is dependent on its contrast to the non-European other.

In reading the writing of women who are presenting versions of themselves, whether mediated or not, students begin to understand that the various categories upon which identity is built on such as gender, race, class, and nationality are constructions, ones that are based on difference. In rethinking these frameworks, the goal is not to just decenter the Western self but to not center the Western Man (or woman in our case) at all. I begin the course by emplacing the class in the Pacific Northwest through the experiences of an Indigenous woman for this very reason.

The first unit on women’s education foregrounds the different experiences of girlhood in the long nineteenth-century in the Pacific Northwest, Korea, and Britain. We begin the class with Harriette Shelton Dover’s Tulalip, From My Heart and her account of Tulalip Indian Boarding School. The memoir grounds the class in the Pacific Northwest, recognizing the importance of understanding the history of the place we inhabit and how it has shaped our present, or to borrow Christina Sharpe’s words “encountering a past that is not past” (13).

Students are surprised to learn that Chemawa Indian School, an off-reservation boarding school for Natives students in Oregon, still exists today, albeit in a different form from its nineteenth-century past. We critically examine the school’s current mission page in contrast to Richard Pratt’s 1892 speech “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” in which he lays out his educational philosophies that drove his Carlisle Indian Industrial School that became the benchmark for Tulalip and Chemawa. As part of the historical background on Indian boarding schools, students are introduced to digital archival research as they explore the Carlisle Boarding School Digital Resource Center and the University of Washington’s digital archives. Our discussions of Dover and Indian Boarding Schools segway into Jane’s childhood and education at Lowood to provincialize Jane Eyre’s middle-class white woman status before students encounter the novel.

In the first section on Jane Eyre, I invest significant time establishing the tropes of the bildungsroman as representative of European modernity and the “becoming” of white male middle-class subjectivity (Bakhtin passim). As a female bildungsroman, we discuss how Jane must be socialized as a woman in addition to an individual and what this entails for Jane. This discussion sets up a way for students to follow Jane’s progress through the novel as well as establish a normative narrative. 

As a non-Western counterpoint to Jane Eyre, excerpts from The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng offers a critique of the term women of color and BIPOC authors as being culturally and temporally-specific.1 Born in an aristocratic family and well-educated, Lady Hyegyŏng married into the Chosŏn royal family at age nine to become one of its senior members as mother and grandmother to two kings. Although she conforms to womanhood in a Confucian and patriarchal society, she is neither otherized in terms of race nor class, seemingly outside of the influences of Western civilization. (We return to her memoirs in unit three to learn that this is not true as her brother was executed on charges of converting to Catholicism, an accusation she claims is false.)

While students examine the various intersections of the three women’s narratives through their similarities such as forced conformity to norms, the loss of a loved one (both Dover and Lady Hyegyŏng lost sisters at a young age like Jane experiences the death of Helen Burns), and strict authority figures, these discussions reveal Jane’s dominant position as a white middle-class woman. This unit also raises important questions about female authorship, audience, editorial mediation, and the genre of autobiography that will be discussed throughout the quarter.

Picking up on the threads of unit one through the “pruned” voice of Mary Prince and slave narrative as a form autobiography in her History of Mary Prince, unit two focuses on love and marriage as a process of female socialization and the critique offered by writers of the Black Atlantic. Although coverture suspended the individuality of white British women under marriage, Prince’s History and the anonymous Woman of Colour raises the question of what it means to live as a woman when your very humanity is denied and erased. Both works demonstrate ways of mobilizing love and marriage as resistance to the racist and sexist structures of British society.

When faced with the horrors of the physical, emotional, and reproductive labor and violence inflicted on enslaved women, Jane’s proclamations of being a “rebel slave” against her cousin John the “slave-driver” or Rochester’s claims about “governessing slavery” ring a bit hollow (15, 13, 311). As we discuss the unraveling of Jane’s courtship with Rochester, on the surface a critique of marriage between unequal subjects, the novel’s championing of Jane’s independence and freedom over the irresolution of the racialized Bertha Mason weakens the commentary. The dehumanization of Bertha and her lack of a voice in Jane’s narrative, coupled with the difficulty of locating enslaved voices, leads to a conversation about the limitations of archives, a question students will explore through their final projects.

In the first two units, we read the writing of non-white authors first, but in the final unit on empire and religion we begin by finishing Jane Eyre. We examine Jane’s Madeiran inheritance, Rochester’s West Indian marriage, and St. John Rivers’s Indian mission, all of which undergird her success as a woman and writer, the personal and the professional aspects of socialization. The inextricability of the British empire from Jane’s narrative brings up the question, what of the lives of women who lived under imperial rule? (The two outliers to this question are Frances E.W. Harper and Lady Hyegyŏng, whose works allow us to examine different ways Christianity affected women outside of the British imperial project.) Through the poetry of Toru Dutt and Krupabai Satthianadhan’s autobiographical novel Saguna, we discuss the lives of Indian women affected by British missionary projects.

These texts are compared to ways male biographers, Toru Dutt’s posthumous memoir by father Govin Dutt and John Murdoch’s Sketches of Indian Christians in which Satthianadhan appears as “Mrs. S. Satthianadhan,” treated these women writers, emphasizing the importance of women’s self-presentation and autobiographical writing. I introduce basic concepts of postcolonialism through short excerpts of Franz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak to supplement our close readings of empire and colonialism. The course ends with Frances E.W. Harper’s 1866 speech “We Are All Bound Up Together,” bringing together threads of critique against white feminism and racism. It also emphasizes the importance of acknowledging, reading, and studying the plurality of experiences of women in the nineteenth century in order to move towards a conception of the human.

1. Lady Hyegyŏng wrote her memoirs in hangul (Korean script) rather than the literary Chinese used by the male literati. As JaHyun Kim Haboush, the translator and editor of The Memoirs, comments, “Women [after the creation of hangul] wrote almost exclusively in Korean. They used the vernacular as a means of self-expression and communication as well as a mode of social and political empowerment” (8).  Back to text

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel).” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1987, pp. 10–59.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Penguin, 2016.

Haboush, JaHyun Kim. “Introduction.” The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea, translated by JaHyun Kim Haboush, University of California Press, 2013, pp. 1–36.

Mignolo, Walter D. “Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 106–23.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation─An Argument.” CR: THe New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337.

Emplacing Race, Gender, and Empire Series

This cluster of syllabi is organized somewhat differently than the others that are featured on Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom (UVC). Instead of assembling independently constructed syllabi around a shared topic, geographic site, or theme, this cluster grew out of a conversation that took place at the 2023 North American Victorian Studies Association conference, where Yangjung Lee expressed interest in adapting a course created by Ryan D. Fong to her own local and institutional context. Although this genesis means that the two syllabi included here share many common features – not the least of which is an investment in understanding the connections between race, gender, and empire in the long nineteenth-century – the cluster provides one case study of how any syllabus on UVC might be revised and resituated to meet an array of institutional needs. These can include customizing text selections in ways that speak to the site-specific histories of a particular university or tailoring the content to address particular student populations and curricular requirements.

Developer Biography

Yangjung Lee is an Assistant Professor of English at Seattle University. Her research and teaching interests include race and empire in nineteenth-century Anglophone literature, slavery and emancipation in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Korean literature. Her book project, “A Guilty Emancipation," problematizes the triumphant narrative of British abolition by reading the absence of compensation for enslavers in Victorian fiction to uncover the racial logic of the post-emancipation British empire. Her work has appeared in Victorian Studies.