AML 4213: Journeys to America
Spring 2012

FRANKLIN

Much could be said of Franklin in terms of his political role in the emergent U.S.; my lecture below, however, concentrates on Franklin as representing an entrepreneurial personality, an exemplary one but also one whose preoccupation with maximizing time and efficiency perhaps should not be entirely endorsed! 

Why Read Franklin:

1.  He is the ultimate pragmatist, whose inventiveness (bifocals, lightning rod, post office, the list goes on and on), anticipates the American culture of gadgetry and convenience.

2.  You can link him to the Protestant ethic of virtuous industriousness: work conceived as a calling/a vocation directed towards service to community (although towards self-advancement also).

3.  Mostly, he exemplifies the so-called “American Dream”: he goes from poverty to wealth, from dependence to independence and power, & from being unknown to being a celebrity.

4.  He is, equally important, a truly modern figure and personality: he would disdain Winthrop’s hierarchical, ultimately feudal, sense of rank (some rich/some poor); he is absolutely mobile and expresses a fluid sense of self within a secular culture.

But, Before You Read Him You Need First to Understand the Huge Shift from a Puritan Mindset to the U.S.18th Century/Enlightenment Mindset, which Franklin so Spectacularly Exemplifies:

These are the broad socio-cultural changes, that morph and eclipse “Puritanism” in America:   

1. Population increases and becomes more mobile: the new waves of immigrants are less zealous, less-Calvinistic; and the second/younger generation of original Puritans are more capitalistic-oriented as they seek western farmland (west=western Pennsylvania), spreading out from their parents’ communities.  And, of course, cities become larger—presenting more economic opportunity and more anonymity.  Franklin’s autobiography, in many ways, is a standard “young man” manual intended to steer artisans/apprentices, separated from their nuclear families, away from urban vice.

2. 1662--Half-Way Covenant dilutes the “faith” community: the second generation did not automatically inherit the zeal of their parents, and this caused a problem—should they be part of the church community if half-hearted?  The Puritans compromised: children of church members (who had testified to their faith) could join without a full statement of their conversion: good conduct was emphasized instead, which eroded the Calvinist precept that good works did not suffice for election to Heaven.

3. Fundamental scientific-philosophical shift: in 1687 Isaac Newton publishes Principia Mathematica, which by explaining the basics of motion & gravity undermines reliance on supernatural explanation of the doings of the physical world.  The “Deist” Enlightenment philosophy also becomes standard for urban intellectuals: the universe is likened to a vast clock created by a creator, a mechanism that can be rationally understood, but which no longer has creator intervention after having been created.

4. Fundamental psychological-philosophical shift: John Locke in 1690 publishes his Treatise on Human Understanding.  He envisions the mind as a blank slate--a tabula rasa--awaiting sensory input from the world, which jumbles together to form ideas.  This kills the notion of innate depravity/inherited sin.

5. Fundamental political-sociological cultural shift: gradually the Great Chain of Being/hierarchal feudal model of governance gets replaced by more democratic/egalitarian ones.  This does not fully happen until the nineteenth-century, but crucially in the eighteenth century there is the rise of what can loosely be called the “public sphere”… a concern with the “public” and so on.  Key in the latter is all those eighteenth-century coffee houses where thinkers, and inventors, and socialites, and politicians hang out and talk, which, along with the explosion of journalistic print, provides a buffer zone, a space to debate political issues.  In Shakespeare's day, there was the "court" and the "masses," but no realm of what today we call "public opinion." In Franklin’s day, a good piece of journalism could arouse political passion and have real effect.

Consequences of the transition:

1.  Less preoccupation with innate depravity/original sin: no essential or stable identity; self is determined by external circumstances and environment.

2.  Paranoia: you are vulnerable to circumstance; you can be controlled or influenced by your environment (think about Brown’s Wieland coming up in a week).

3.  But such also creates opportunity: you can influence others by manipulating the environment/ self is malleable.

4. This leads to fascination with impressions one creates/ with public effect or public persona.

5. You’ll notice that both Franklin and Equiano refer to “impressions” frequently. Both also refer to “character,” which seems to have more to do with reputation than inward essence. Equiano sometimes uses the language of conversion/predestination/sovereign God; but he is equally at home in the pragmatic world of Franklin.

6. Franklin--his pragmatism, fascination with gadgetry, entrepreneurial savvyness, recognition of mobility/fluidity within a secular culture (note all the aspiring young artisans in his narrative)--is a truly modern figure: homo economicus. On the one hand, a self always improving and always "on the make" is positive; on the other hand, Franklin's emphasis on not wasting time and on efficiency, for us (Franklin himself seems anxiety free) heralds an aspect of modern selfhood not entirely desirable!

7. He is also a media man: once Franklin perceives his life as one that might be imitated, everything comes directed towards external display and not towards introspection.

Our Modern “U.S.” Identity Combines Aspects of Puritan Mentality and Franklin/Enlightenment Mentality:

1. Puritans restlessly look about, trying to determine whether they are saved or not. This leads to introspection, guilt, anxiety, and a general sense that you should be not just be, as it were, relaxing. This need to act dutifully (although such doesn’t earn you salvation) gets absorbed into the Franklin-eque entrepreneurial ideology of not wasting time.

2. It is called the Protestant work ethic (even if you’re not religious).

3. You strive to work hard not just to “get ahead” but because it’s bad to waste time, to not be productive.

4. We all suffer from this guilt-ridden restlessness, but the “rat race” is a cultural/ideological invasion of your mind largely!!!

Franklin Study Questions:

1. What is missing in this autobiography (does Frankling explicitly voice anger?).

2. Why does he always talk about appearances, “character” that might deceive, and so on?

3. Does Franklin seem too self-conscious in his appearance of industriousness? Does he have a self, or is he a sum of the roles he plays?

4. Does Franklin believe in sin?

5.  Do you approve of Franklin’s effort to change his habits (his description of his grid)?  Would you want a roommate such as Franklin? Does Franklin make self-improvement almost a technology? An engineering of the self?  Go to the bookstore sometime (if you can find one!) and check out the “pop” psychology self-help section: Franklin heralds our contemporary faith that we can change our selves readlily.

Literary Theory Tip:

Somewhere in the 70s, we began to look at literary texts not just as aesthetic artifacts, great to become absorbed by as “inert” (however nuanced) objects, but also as having force in the real world.  Thus various brands of political criticism—most notably Feminist and Marxist studies—which see texts as promoting ideologies or resisting ideologies, of securing the status quo or actively resisting it.

Interestingly, much ink has been spilt trying to demonstrate, for instance, that Shakespeare’s The Tempest is anti-woman and pro-colonial (Miranda & Caliban = properly submissive) or the reverse.  How could it be possible that a single play could be at once conservative and radical? Teasing out such issues is one of the fun aspects of literary theory, both in the sense of arguing about what a particular  text “does” and more broadly about what we think literature “does.”

An anecdote: once upon a time I was a very nervous graduate student and I come across a very confident “radical” deconstructionist-prone fellow graduate student. He’s holding some novel in his hands.  I say “what does the book do”?  He says, with absolute disdain, “books don’t DO anything.” And, according to his deconstruction mindset, such would be the case, since all texts collapse into their own internal de-construction conflicts.  Fast-forward ½ decade, when Deconstruction was “out” and “New Historicism” was in; and of course the question—what do books “do”?—had then become all the rage. I was not being prescient, because what I really meant was “what is the book about … why should I find it compelling?” but the episode stuck in my mind about the winds-of-change about literary theory.

These days, most literary theorists and most literature professors are simultaneously deconstructionists and New Historicists.  Such should be impossible, as the approaches are radically different.  However, if you look upon texts as “performances”—not just stating a meaning, but “performing” a meaning—the two become compatible. Rowlandson “performs” piety, but her text gets hung up on the effort (her rage over inept Puritan rescuers, her grief that goes largely unmentioned, her ambivalent regard for the “demon” Indians, and so on).

In the case of Franklin, he “performs” being an exemplary citizen: a hard worker, a patriot, sophisticated enough (most of the Founding Fathers were very clever and subtle) to recognize his own naiveté); and yet the text necessarily represses a lot to perform what it performs (little deep psychological expressions of regret or anxiety, little emotion about family members, and little spontaneity or impulsiveness).

In short, it is a text that “performs” its rhetoric and tries to avoid other rhetorics that might get in the way.  So, the trick, is to see what a text “does” or “performs” and yet also how all “performance” precludes alternative performances, some of which might, inadvertently, stick out here and there (e.g., the convenient way that all those that get in Franklin’s way end up going to the far corners of the British colonial empire and fail).