Teaching "The Sot-weed Factor" Out of Historical Context

Abstract

Teaching "The Sot-weed Factor" Out of Historical Context Scott Peeples (bio) Most teachers of Early American Literature devote considerable time and energy to contextualizing (or intertextualizing) the poems, tracts, relations, narratives, and sermons on the syllabus. For good reason, Americanists have moved away from justifying the teaching of early texts by referring continually to cultural and literary traditions they establish or foreshadow, as if they were all merely precursors to the real American literature; instead, we encourage students to examine these texts in relation to their own times, their own discourse communities. That's certainly what I try to do in my pre-1800 survey—and yet, I think there are still useful ways to read early texts in light of later texts that reflect back on them. Think, for instance, of "A Modell of Christian Charity" and Ronald Reagan's repeated allusions to the "city upon a hill." A less obvious example, perhaps, is Ebenezer Cook's "The Sot-weed Factor" (1708). I say "less obvious" because, although the poem is frequently taught in early American courses, few students I have encountered are already familiar with either Cook's poem or John Barth's 1960 novel inspired by and named after it. Of course, Cook's "Sot-weed Factor" should be read in terms of European images of "the American" in the early eighteenth century, Chesapeake regional identity during that period, the economic and cultural importance of tobacco, the conventions of English satire in the period following the restoration, and so on. But in his essay in Teaching the Literatures of Early America, David Shields suggests an additional framework: This caricature of Maryland . . . dramatizes the problem of publicity: If reputation is everything, then how does one counter a bad report? You take its language and imagery and blow it up until it is a flagrant fiction incredible even to the dull-witted. This fantasy Maryland becomes disassociated with people's conceptions of the actual place. [End Page 351] Shields goes on to draw an analogy with caricatures of the modern-day South seen on Hee-Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard (132). I also think that temporarily leaping out of historical context can help students to better understand "The Sot-weed Factor," but I ask students to consider this poem as part of a comic, surreal tradition, in which a hapless everyman (usually an outsider) suffers exaggerated abuse and humiliation, staggering about in a constant state of confusion. The emphasis in these texts is on the compounding of misfortune; the audience, recognizing the exaggerated, comic nature of the story, enjoys seeing things go from bad to worse to even worse. We could probably all brainstorm various texts that continue this tradition, but my own list would include Poe's story "Loss of Breath," in which a man is continually mistaken for a corpse and subject to all manner of ill treatment, parts of Roughing It by Mark Twain, Harold Lloyd's silent films, and Martin Scorsese's After Hours. However, the text I use in class with "The Sot-weed Factor" is "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," which epitomizes this surrealist suffering tradition and offers several parallels with Cook, despite the fact that there's no evidence Dylan knew the poem. (It's worth noting that the song is particularly easy to incorporate into a class session because it takes up only 6½ minutes.) Often my students do not get "The Sot-weed Factor." They need to understand that Cook's intentions are comic. The anthology's head note can say it's comic, and the instructor can point out the objects of satire, the hyperbole and absurdity, and so on, but my students still don't process the poem as comedy. Presenting them with something obviously similar in its structure, in its tone, helps them to recognize what's familiar in the poem. "Dylan's 115th Dream" is much shorter than Cook's poem, and, as the title suggests, more dreamlike and surreal, but I tell my students that I think Dylan and Cook are playing the same kind of game, and that Cook's readers might have heard his poem much as Dylan's listeners heard...