Having this time to devote to a project-based assignment, as opposed to a paper or short essay, definitely made me look into a broader historical perspective instead of solely digging into the literary aspect. I spent a lot of time on the text itself, as that was crucial to gaining the depth of understanding to complete this project, which required even more layers of historical and social implications.
This project allowed me to take a text I enjoyed, like Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”, spend more time engaging with it, and apply it to a period of political and social theory that I also found incredibly interesting – the American Renaissance. These items allowed me to look back to the origins of Puritan society and connect with another text within our course, The Captivity and Recollection of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, and also dig into the incredibly complex political, social, and religious phenomena of the Salem witch trials. In this assignment, I was able to see those threads working their way through time and then bringing in our contemporary analysis with aspects like the text synopsis and being able to create those promotional blurbs.
I definitely do see moments of these political and social issues evident in Hawthorne’s work and that period of redefinition of the American Renaissance today. In one of my political science courses last spring called The Politics of Evil, we spent an entire unit on the politics of the Salem witch trials. At the end of the class, I wrote a paper titled “The Politics of Hysteria: Exploring the Interconnections of the Salem Witch Trials and Contemporary QAnon Conspiracy-Driven Evils.” Working with the book by Frances Hill titled A Delusion of Satan, I looked at not only the unique gendered experiences of those early Puritan communities but also the looming threats that influenced the hysterical political phenomenon. Those concepts resonated with me throughout our class discussions of Rowlandson, especially regarding the threat of Native Americans and an upset to traditional feminine domesticity and piety. In selecting her for a promotional blurb, I thought it was also an excellent chance to connect some of my work outside this class.
Through reading Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and imagining her reaction to Hawthorne’s text, I was given even more context into the mindsets of women during this period and how authorship played a role in Puritan society that I didn’t know of before this course. I think today we are seeing a somewhat troubling resurgence of more conservative, religiously entrenched politics, especially on items pertaining to women, such as reproductive rights – thinking of the way certain political campaigns are harnessing the uncertainties of our time and very isolated and susceptible groups of people and weaponizing that to gain political agendas…not unlike Salem in the 15th century which speaks for itself.
Expressing my learning in all these aspects previously mentioned through a creative and unconventional format was super fun for me; while I do really love exploring and analyzing what I am learning through a more conventional written form, this was a nice break to see what I could do creatively. I am fortunate to have spent a lot of time using ePortfiolio since my first year here and spend a lot of time helping others with it in my writing fellow work, so that was a nice opportunity for me to make something I am proud of in ePortfolio as a project.
It was also great to see the multimedia effects that WordPress can include that a paper cannot, and even just the aesthetic ability to create a certain feeling that I wanted to get across in this book jacket that reflects my love of books and how much cover art or fonts can really help express the essence of a book or literary work was very rewarding for me.
Leave a Reply