By Tracy Floreani

This essay is part of The MLA Democracy Project: Essays on Teaching Democracy and Literature.

So much writing in the Americas post–European settlement was engaged—both overtly and implicitly—with trying to identify, understand, or describe what made American culture distinctive from its European roots. In undergraduate surveys of American literature, I like to begin with a text that helps students think about the ways in which writers might use their medium to explore the idea of “the American character.” Of course, we discuss how flawed such a monolithic conceptualization of culture can be, but such efforts were, nonetheless, a steady preoccupation for many people of letters in the early decades of the country. And some of the characteristics those writers identified have remained through lines in our contemporary culture.

Like other instructors, I structure such survey courses chronologically so as to attend to historical developments parallel to the evolutions of literary movements. I typically choose a first text, however, that is extra-chronological and designed to both establish questions and themes that might appear throughout the survey and serve the practical purpose of helping students brush up on critical reading skills. To that end, I have had found that excerpts from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer establish a productive foundation.

Letter III (“What Is an American”) and portions of a few others are included in all American literature textbook anthologies, and the entire text is available online through Project Gutenberg. Portions of Letters IV and IX, which include, respectively, representations of Indigenous peoples and of the institution of slavery, also serve as especially interesting readings for students. Starting with Letter III, which focuses entirely on people of European descent, students quickly notice how the author’s views represent the era’s not-so-inclusive approach to the definition of “an American.” Then, reading the other portions for a following class session with the author’s foundational definition in mind can lead to productive discussion of how pre-Revolution Euro-Americans thought about issues of race and Indigeneity.

Of course, many traditional-age college students don’t love reading eighteenth-century nonfiction prose, but with carefully designed discussion protocols, they can learn to work with the text and establish their voices in a classroom based on a collaborative, inquiry-based study. Depending on the size of the class, discussion should begin in small groups or discussion sections to help encourage conversation and create classmate cohorts. I assign each group a specific element of the text to focus on, such as descriptions of “the American character,” representations of Europe, mentions of social class, observations about regionalisms, or the author’s thoughts about religion in America. When the students work together to look closely at the text for their specific examples, the basic framework of the exercise evolves into more analysis; they tend to become more confident about how to interpret the text and their opinions of what Crèvecoeur is saying by considering his specific assertions and how he is making them. For instance, he is clearly an anglophile who eschews his own French background, and the specific ways he describes Englishmen—as well as what he omits from those descriptions and the other peoples he doesn’t even mention in Letter III’s definition of “American”—leads to some interesting, often amusing discussions about his biases, his idealistic claims about various elements of the inchoate American culture, and his broad assertions about how American personalities have evolved in connection to regional landscapes, flora and fauna, and the extent of European settlement in a locale.

As the groups come back to the whole class for further discussion, I then push their observations toward some inductive analysis, asking them to identify from their examples common American values that still arise in national discourse. They quickly create a list of such ideals as the freedom to own property; the ability to pursue the type of work one wants, to get ahead through hard work, and to keep the wages of that work; freedom of expression; freedom of religion; the ability to place one’s own interests above those of the collective and to make of oneself whatever one desires regardless of status at birth; and the role of government in meting out justice. (Then, we amend these observations to make note of how these ideals differed from Indigenous perspectives on land use and didn’t apply to those who weren’t free to own property or their own wages, which comes back into play when studying women authors and slave narratives later in the term.) The text also invites links to observations about these ideas in contemporary American culture, such as differences in regional cultures, religious conflict, Americans’ ongoing fascination with the British monarchy, and whether the “American Dream” still exists within their generation. In short, though, the list of ideals we create looks like a pretty standard list of democratic American values. And then we talk about the author’s Tory sympathies.

As often as I remind them to read the introductory materials and biographies connected to each assignment, few develop that habit at the course’s outset, and they almost always miss that Crèvecoeur was a Tory sympathizer and royalist. I tuck that biographical detail away while they work in their groups, and then we grapple with reconciling the democratic American values he articulates with his political sympathies—and the fact that the United States and its founding documents didn’t yet exist when he first drafted the Letters. This leads to a really nice rounding out of our work with the text, in which we discuss how most political debates are about not the values themselves but the interpretations of them and the best means to enact them. The students come to see how competing interpretations of the “how” around a shared “what” have been a part of this country since its earliest days, and this notion can then inform many productive explorations of subsequent texts, whether by Spanish explorers, Puritans, the British merchant class, or the Transcendentalists.

Work Cited

St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector. Letters from an American Farmer. 1782. Project Gutenberg, 14 Sept. 2023, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4666.

Tracy Floreani is professor emerita of English at Oklahoma City University and executive director of the Bibliographical Society of America.