Once More to the Garden: American Education History and the American Studies Field Imaginary Reconsidered

I argue that national educational debates and methodological debates in American studies intersect at field-envisioning semantic and ideological sites in common—here I am interested in that of the garden. American studies... [ view full abstract ]

I argue that national educational debates and methodological debates in American studies intersect at field-envisioning semantic and ideological sites in common—here I am interested in that of the garden. American studies has been trying to pry itself from Perry Miller for four decades (Bercovitch 1978), but the exceptionalist origins of the field imaginary prevent a total departure from this complicity. A similar refrain exists in the under-theorized discipline of education history. Even before the (contested date) 1860 advent of Froebelian kindergarten in America, there existed an Anglo-American rhetorical tradition of comparing the education of children to the cultivation of plants that I have dated to John Locke (1693). Like most fields outside of education, American studies has marginalized pre-university educational contexts. This marginalization persists despite American studies’ inclusivity and despite Eric Cheyfitz’s (2002) call for reconfiguring postsecondary teaching as part of an “open circuit” with pre-university education. As a step toward honoring Cheyfitz’s sensibilities, my work devises literary and cultural analyses that center educational debates in the realm of humanistic inquiry, to reread the garden, pace Leo Marx, as a realm of civic production. I will briefly outline my grounding analysis of Cooper’s (1823) The Pioneers as an educational romance, and then trace the trope of the educational garden through the tandem German romantic influences of the bildungsroman—particularly Carlyle/Goethe (1824)—and the kindergarten on American categories of personhood. I end with Norris’s (1899) McTeague, in which the title character kills his wife in a kindergarten and children discover her body.