Classical Education and American Literature

Lately, I have found myself increasingly involved in the pioneering adventure of helping to start new schools and colleges in the classical liberal arts tradition. I am on the boards of both Rosary College and another college, the name of which I am not yet at liberty to disclose. The former is a two-year undergraduate institution in the Catholic and classical tradition for which I’ll be teaching this autumn; the latter is a “merely Christian” institution which aims to commence operations by offering a single graduate program, a Master of Arts in the Humanities. The third board on which I am a member is Sacred Heart Hybrid Academy, which will offer classes two days a week to supplement and enrich local Catholic homeschooling in the upstate of South Carolina where I live.

In my role with the Sacred Hearth Hybrid Academy, I have helped design the high school literature curriculum, which covers classic texts from Homer through to Tolkien and Lewis. In considering the selection of texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was American literature which presented the greatest challenge. A colleague suggested the following shortlist:  Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Great Gatsby, Our Town, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Violent Bear It Away, Joan of Arc by Mark Twain, and The Old Man and the Sea.

This set me thinking and, more to the point, it set me thinking outside the box.

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather’s historical novel, should definitely be included. Not merely is it a literary classic, which should be on any reputable American high school literature curriculum, but it is a work based on the lives of two pioneering Catholic priests in late nineteenth century New Mexico and their struggles to establish the first Catholic diocese in that far-flung corner of the “Wild West”. It merits a place, therefore, as literature but also as an American history text and a Church history text.

I was less comfortable, and even uncomfortable, with all the other suggestions on the list. They are all great books that are worth reading but were there better choices? This is when the thinking outside the box really began.

The American literature texts would be taught in the junior and senior years only and would have to share room on the curriculum with classics of British literature by Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, R. H. Benson, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, as well as selected verse by the Metaphysical and Romantic Poets. It seemed to me that all the titles on the original shortlist, with the exception of Cather’s novel, would need to be squeezed out so that worthier selections could be squeezed in.

The first selection was Evangeline, the epic poem by Longfellow, a choice which was motivated in part by the need to address the longstanding and ongoing neglect of this great poet. Longfellow was the colossus of American poetry in the nineteenth century, unrivalled in reputation until he fell out of fashion with the rise of modernism in the twentieth century. He is to American nineteenth-century poetry what Tennyson is to British nineteenth-century poetry. Both these giants have been neglected and omitted from school curricula because the modernists considered their formal style outmoded and their conservative sensibilities suspect or unpalatable. The restoration of Longfellow to the curriculum is, therefore, the rectification of a sin of omission.

Although other Longfellow poems might have been selected, I especially like Evangeline within the context of a specifically Catholic classical education because the eponymous heroine is a devout Catholic and the priesthood is depicted positively, even though Longfellow was not himself a Catholic. Another reason for the inclusion of this text, as with Death Comes for the Archbishop, is because it is based on real historical events and Evangeline is herself based on a real historical character. The poem tells of the expulsion from Acadia of French Catholics by the British in the mid-eighteenth century and their subsequent settling in southern Louisiana, establishing what is now known as Cajun culture. Evangeline is, therefore, recounting a key chapter of the history of the United States and also a key chapter of the history of the Catholic Church in America.

The next selection is by Longfellow’s great contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Instead of opting for the more usually selected novel, The Scarlet Letter, I chose a selection of his marvelous short stories in a handsome new edition from Cluny Media. Apart from these stories warranting selection in their own right, especially the satirical and cautionary brilliance of “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”, it was also necessary to strike a balance of genres by including longer and shorter verse, both epic and lyrical, novels, short stories and plays (or at least one play, of which more presently).

With Longfellow and Hawthorne flying the flag for American literature in the nineteenth century, three authors were selected to fly the flag in the twentieth century: T.S. Eliot, Willa Cather and Flannery O’Connor.

The inclusion of Eliot would seem obvious enough. He was indubitably the most influential poet of the twentieth century and his Catholic sympathies make him a good choice for a Catholic classical curriculum. Also, as the herald and hero of modernism, his inclusion serves as a counterpoint and counterbalance to the choice of the “conservative” and “traditional” poetry of Longfellow, ensuring that the avant-garde as well as the old guard are equally represented. As for which of his poetry to include, I’ve selected The Waste Land, which is a personal favourite and which I’ve taught many times, but I would also hope that there might be time to include some of his other verse, especially Four Quartets.

Eliot’s verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral, was also included, partly to ensure the presence of drama in the senior year, supplementing the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare, which the students will be studying in their freshman and sophomore years, but also because, like Evangeline and Death Comes for the Archbishop, it integrates the teaching of history with the teaching of literature. Murder in the Cathedral dramatizes the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, thereby incorporating Church history and the lives of the saints into the literature curriculum.

I’ve already explained the rationale for the place of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop on the curriculum, so we’ll move on to the final American literature selection, which is “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor. I have what I think is a good reason for choosing this solitary short story instead of the original suggestion that we select O’Connor’s novel The Violent Bear It Away. Although the novel is brilliant, if something so dark can be called brilliant, it is, me judice, a little too grim, grotesque and gruesome for teenaged sensibilities. Highschoolers are not ready for such relentless evil and I fear that the subtextual inklings of grace and redemption will be beyond the naiveté of their ken. “Good Country People”, on the other hand, seasons the darkness with humour. We can sense Flannery O’Connor chuckling to herself as she wrote it and we find ourselves chuckling along with her when we read it. The story of the ironically named Joy Hopewell, who rejects joy and refuses to hope well, changing her name to the deliberately ugly Hulga, is a parable, a cautionary tale which shows the absurdity of pride. This solitary short story should be sufficient to whet the young reader’s appetite for more of what Flannery O’Connor has to offer without overdosing the immature mind with too much of the dark underbelly of life. In any case, O’Connor distillations of darkness, like all strong spirits, are best taken in small doses. Her short stories are proof of the aphorism that brevity is the soul of wit and, considering their subtextual Catholicism, that brevity is the soul of witness.

Such are my thoughts on the place of American literature within a Catholic classical high school curriculum. I hope and pray that these selections will enrich the minds and ennoble the hearts of the pioneering students who will form the first class at Sacred Heart Hybrid Academy this semester.

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