Nearly every year since she started at Bryn Mawr in 2001, Bethany Schneider, associate professor of Literatures in English, has taught a course grounded in some aspect of literature during the era of American expansion.
However, it is her course on a particular book, one with no significant female characters, that has become so beloved that it has been made a part of one of Bryn Mawr’s many traditions.
“Moby Dick was written in the mid 19th century, but it’s like Melville had a bunch of 21st-century college students in mind,” says Schneider. “It gives itself utterly and completely to the classroom. There is such a diversity of scholarship on it that you can really introduce students to a more advanced study of American literature.”
And while no one would ever confuse Moby Dick with summer beach reading, it is “a crazy, wacky, bananas book,” says Schneider. “It's so creative, it's so weird that they can feel called into an exciting kind of scholarship, and their papers are as weird and creative as the novel, which is so fun.”
Schneider is always looking for new scholarship on the book to incorporate into her class, but one constant is the book Mariners, Renegades and Castaways by C.L.R. James.
“All of us who are teaching or thinking about Moby Dick are drawing on the work of James, whether we know it or not,” says Schneider.
Each time it's offered, the class includes a trip to Special Collections, which has amassed more than 40 adaptations and interpretations of the book, from an issue of Harper’s Bazaar with a pre-publication chapter from the novel to children’s books and comics.
“This is a great example of how we are building collections around texts that are used in classes to add information on the historical reception of the works and to provoke discussion by introducing new voices into the classrooms,” says Marianne Hansen, curator and academic liaison for rare books and manuscripts.
Schneider developed the class in connection with the 2017 residency of Brown University Professor Bonnie Honig as part of the Flexner Lectureship series. The course has been such a hit with students that nearly every year, a Literatures in English major chooses it as a topic for their thesis. When they do, a copy of the Melville novella Billy Budd, signed by all the previous students whose thesis focused on the story of the pursuit of the white whale, is passed along to them as a May Day gift.
This year, the book is the property of Maddie Raymond ’26. Receiving her copy and seeing her name inscribed made her thesis feel real, she says.
“I joke with my friends that it feels like my name was written into a covenant,” Raymond says. “Every time I feel stuck, all I have to do is look at my name written there and I'm reminded of these people that came before me and the work they put into their own Moby Dick theses. I want to make them proud.”
Raymond says she never imagined when she started at Bryn Mawr that she would be writing her thesis on Moby Dick, but she couldn’t get the class out of her mind. The social aspect, being connected to something larger than herself, solidified that decision.
Schneider is on leave next academic year, when she’ll be finishing up her latest novel Philadelphia Divine, but plans on teaching Moby Dick “until the day I die.” She’s also thought about putting together something over Zoom with former students who might be interested in revisiting the novel.
“It would be interesting to read it with folks who have been out in the world for a while,” Schneider says. “I think there’d be a whole different set of questions raised by the book for older readers, and it would be fun to explore that."
Literatures in English
