OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM WALLS: ALTERNATIVE PEDAGOGIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE, 1868-1910 Anne Lindsey Bruder A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2009 Approved by: Advisor: Eliza Richards Reader: Robert Cantwell Reader: Philip Gura Reader: Joy Kasson Reader: Timothy Marr ©2009 Anne Lindsey Bruder ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT ANNE BRUDER: Outside the Classroom Walls: Alternative Pedagogical in American Literature and Culture, 1868-1910 (Under the direction of Eliza Richards) This study examines women’s innovative extra-institutional methods and spaces of learning in American Literature and Culture between 1868 and 1910. “Outside the Classroom Walls” argues that we can discover a genealogy of unconventional and progressive models of instruction not in that era’s schoolhouse curricula or in the writings of well-known pedagogues, but in its imaginative literature, in the unpublished letters of the first American correspondence school, and in the live exhibits of a labor museum. In Louisa May Alcott’s domestic novels for adolescents, Anna Eliot Ticknor’s epistolary Society to Encourage Studies at Home, and Jane Addams’s Labor Museum and autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, we find various manifestations of a radically egalitarian strain of education that existed in opposition to traditional learning environments that were often inhospitable to individual needs. These educational experiments, both real and unreal, were refuges and their students and teachers exiles from the nation’s female academies, public grammar and high schools, and newly-opened women’s colleges. The unintended result of this exile was that the era’s most exciting and significant educational innovations initially happened outside of the conventional classroom, but were then disseminated throughout it. The hallmark of these pioneering iii pedagogues was their cultivation of a shared imaginative space between teacher and student in which traditional hierarchies of class, race, gender, and age were attenuated. In the process of working beyond the classroom walls, these writers transformed the meaning of education in America, bridging the gap between antebellum domestic instruction and the public and political initiatives most commonly associated with the Progressive Era. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Among my earliest school memories are those that any teacher would cringe to hear. In elementary school, I was placed on a behavior contract because I asked too many questions and in high school my calculus teacher, long tired of explaining derivatives to me, bellowed in front of the whole class: “Anne, why must you insist on being so obtuse?” I hid under the piano in nursery school and locked myself in the girls’ bathroom in junior high. School, it seems, didn’t work so well for me. It was my good fortune, then, that all of this changed under the caring guidance of Robert Schine, who at Middlebury College convinced me that my questions were valuable, and that I could trust them to guide my future pursuits. Since then, I have been still more fortunate to work with a dissertation committee at the University of North Carolina that has continually believed in me and in this project, even when neither I nor it warranted their belief. Robert Cantwell simultaneously introduced me to Jane Addams and to the very best kinds of teaching. Timothy Marr, whose prodigious enthusiasm buoyed both my spirits and my ideas time and again, helped me think big and realize what it was that I had turned up in the archives. Joy Kasson gave me the chance to teach what I love, convinced me that this project really did have to be about women, and counseled me through it all. Philip Gura started me off on the right foot, supplied me with treasures in the form of old schoolbooks, and remained a steady source of guidance and good cheer. And finally, Eliza Richards, director and friend, arrived at UNC during a key point in my graduate education, just as I was starting to think about literature and pedagogy. With equal measures of patience and gentle prodding, she shepherded me through this project and generously shared her tremendous intelligence and keen sense of the way texts work. I’ve little doubt that it will take me a lifetime to repay the debt I owe her. I am grateful to the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina for providing me with an Evan Frankel dissertation v fellowship and to the Graduate School at UNC for granting me an Off-Campus Research fellowship that supported my archival work at the Boston Public Library, the Houghton and Schlesinger Libraries at Harvard University, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. I am indebted to the librarians at each of these institutions for the assistance they provided me. In a solitary profession, I’ve been privileged to feel rarely alone. I learned from Maura and Jonathan D’Amore, Nick Gaskill, Matthew Spencer, Bryan Sinche, Tara Robbins, Karah Rempe, Kelly Ross, Aaron Shakleford, Elizabeth Stockton, and Elissa Zellinger. Gregg Flaxman, John McGowan, and Jane Danielewicz gave gentle guidance and unfailing support. My fellow summer scholars at Andover asked tough questions and waded with me through the answers. Thank you to Emily Moore, Tasha Hawthorne, Chris Jones, and Joe Kugelmass. Bob and Vicki Zwerdling lent me a bed in Boston next to the Public Library time and again, and Ada Fan shared with me her alcove for a day of writing one November that led to many more. Katherine Stirling patiently listened to every development and every mistake, and nevertheless remains my dear friend. Elena Oxman and Armistead Lemon Wilson began this whole thing with me, spent seven years sharing their wisdom and showing me that I could finish it, and will—I hope—be there long after its done. And to my parents, John Bruder and Carolyn Keith, and Mimi Bruder and Don Hunt, who were endlessly patient and unquestioningly supportive. To my Grandparents, Virginia and Franklin Riggle, of blessed memory, autodidacts who grew up with little on farms in the Midwest but with whom I never felt a moment of scarcity. To all of my siblings, but especially to my little sister, Molly Jean Bruder, whom I failed every time we played school as children (I always got to be the teacher), but who continues to teach me more than I ever did her. To Arlo, beloved witness and guide. And finally, to Joshua Aaron Guthman, without whom this would have taken another seven years to finish and with whom I look forward to a beautiful post-graduate life. To him this work is lovingly dedicated. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ................................................................................................................... ix Prologue............................................................................................................................. x Introduction - Home Learning .........................................................................................1 I. Plumfield: A Home Transformed...................................................................7 II. Three Teachers ..............................................................................................15 III. An Alternative to What? ...............................................................................35 Chapter One - Centering on the Student: Progressive Pedagogy in the Age of the Alcotts..............................................................36 I. Teaching in the Temple ................................................................................45 II. Intermezzo: A Dream ....................................................................................61 III. Experience in the Novel, Experiencing the Novel .......................................65 IV. Circulating Alcott: Lessons for the Classroom.............................................86 Chapter Two - “The Little Seed Which You Planted is Now a Wide-spreading Oak”: Women’s Epistolary Education in the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, 1873-1897.................................................95 I. The Work of Benevolence ..........................................................................100 II. Women’s Intimacy and National Belonging..............................................111 III. Circulation: Publicity, Gender, and Geography.........................................128 IV. Commencement ..........................................................................................152 Chapter Three - “What has the artist done about it?”: Jane Addams, Education Reform, and the Work of Art.............................................154 vii I. The Barrage of Books: Jane Addams and the Failure of American Schools..................................161 II. Culture as Understanding: Jane Addams’s Artist .....................................172 III. Learning in Action: The Hull-House Labor Museum...............................181 IV. Follow My Lead: Transporting Hull-House...............................................200 Epilogue.........................................................................................................................222 Bibliography...................................................................................................................234 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.