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ela-2017:RL.11-12.9 Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more diverse texts from the same period treat similar themes and/or topics.
ela-2017:RL.11-12.10 By the end of grade 11, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in the grades 11-CCR text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range, building background knowledge and activating prior knowledge in order to make personal, societal, and ethical connections that deepen understanding of complex text. By the end of grade 12, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, at the high end of the grades 11-CCR text complexity band independently and proficiently, building background knowledge and activating prior knowledge in order to make personal, societal, and ethical connections that deepen understanding of complex text.
Learning goal: Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more diverse texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics. Read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas and poems, in the grades 11-CCR text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range by the end of grade 11 and independently by the end of grade 12, building background knowledge and activating prior knowledge in order to make personal, societal and ethical connections that deepen understanding of complex text.
What "foundational" means, and a working map of the periods. A foundational work is one that later American writers answer, borrow from or push against, so that knowing it helps a reader understand what came after. Knowledge of the periods begins with a map. In the eighteenth century, Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) made her the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry, and political writing such as the Declaration of Independence (1776) shaped the language of rights that literature would later test. In the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" (1841) argued for individual conscience; Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845) turned autobiography into an argument against slavery; Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) examined public shame and private truth; Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) remade the American poem. Near the century's end, writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Kate Chopin (The Awakening, 1899) examined the gap between the self a society permits and the self a person is. In the early twentieth century, Susan Glaspell's Trifles (first performed 1916), studied in the previous lesson, dramatized the same gap. This map is a starting point for knowledge, not a substitute for reading the works.
The other two periods, in their own words. Knowledge of a period comes from reading its works, not only from dating them. Phillis Wheatley's eight-line poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America" (in her 1773 Poems) speaks in the grateful, pious voice her readers expected, yet it reports their contempt and quotes it, "Some view our sable race with scornful eye, / 'Their colour is a diabolic die,'" and answers it with a command: "Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train." An accepted surface carries a claim its audience did not invite, an eighteenth-century form of this lesson's theme (some readers take the gratitude as wholly sincere, and the poem supports discussion of both readings). In the early twentieth century, Trifles stages the same gap: Mr. Hale's remark that "women are used to worrying over trifles" is the surface the women are allowed, and behind it they conceal the box that could convict Mrs. Wright. The comparison below then goes deep on two texts from the 1890s.
Two diverse texts from the same period. This lesson compares two works published three years apart. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper" was published in 1892 in The New England Magazine. Paul Laurence Dunbar, born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872 to parents who had been enslaved, published the poem "We Wear the Mask" in his collection Majors and Minors (1895). The texts are diverse in form (a first-person story told as a private journal; a fifteen-line lyric poem in the French rondeau form, with two rhyme sounds and a refrain drawn from its opening words), in speaker (one white, middle-class wife; a collective "we" that readers have long understood as Black Americans in the decades after emancipation), and in the pressure they describe (a marriage and a medical authority; a society organized by race). Both treat a similar theme: a person forced to hide the true self behind a surface that others accept.
Gilman: the journal as a hidden self. The narrator's husband is a physician who "does not believe I am sick," and she is "absolutely forbidden to 'work' until I am well again." She writes anyway, secretly: "I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition." The journal itself is her concealed self. She confesses to it what she will not say aloud: "John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster." The parenthesis enacts the concealment: she begins the admission ("perhaps"), breaks it off with a bracketed aside about who may hear it, and only then finishes the thought outside the brackets, so her real opinion is delayed and hedged even on the page. Over the story she comes to see a woman trapped behind the pattern of the wallpaper, and the ending fuses her with that woman: "'I've got out at last,' said I, 'in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!'" The escape is also a breakdown. Gilman's treatment of the theme is double: the hidden self breaks through the surface, but only at a terrible cost. (The story depicts a mental breakdown in disturbing detail; teachers should prepare students before reading it in full.)
Dunbar: the mask as a shared strategy. Dunbar's poem opens: "We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— / This debt we pay to human guile." The surface here is not torn away; it is worn deliberately, but as payment of a "debt" to a deceptive world, so the choice is made under pressure and at a cost: "With torn and bleeding hearts we smile." The second stanza asks, "Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sighs?" The speakers refuse to give the world their suffering to count. The third stanza turns to prayer, "We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries / To thee from tortured souls arise," so the true self is shown only to God. The refrain "We wear the mask," repeated at the end of stanzas two and three, the last time with an exclamation point, turns concealment into a shared, defiant act.
Same theme, different treatments. Both texts place a surface (the mask; the wallpaper and the obedient wife) between the self and the world, and both give the reader access to what lies behind it (the journal; the prayer). The differences are the analysis. Gilman's concealed self is individual and becomes destructive when suppressed; Dunbar's is collective and, on one common reading, is protected by concealment, though the poem insists on what that protection costs. Gilman's narrator addresses "dead paper"; Dunbar's speakers address God. Gilman's surface is torn off; Dunbar's is kept on. Comparing them does not mean flattening the different pressures of race and gender into one; it means seeing how two writers in the same decade used the same figure to reveal different injustices.
Reading at the high end of the band. Both texts are complex for reasons a reader can name: an unreliable narrator whose perception changes; unfamiliar or dated words ("guile," "over-wise," "phosphites"); an old verse form; meaning carried by pattern and refrain. Proficient comprehension is supported by building background knowledge (the "rest cure," a treatment of enforced rest and forbidden work then prescribed to some women; what life was like for Black Americans in the 1890s, when legally enforced segregation was expanding) and activating prior knowledge (what you already know about masks, performance and silence). Scaffolding by the end of grade 11 might include a glossary, a paragraph-by-paragraph log of the narrator's perceptions and a stanza paraphrase; by the end of grade 12 the reader performs those steps independently. Connections deepen understanding when they are specific: a personal connection (a time you performed a self you did not feel), a societal connection (who is expected to "grin" at work or in public today), and an ethical one (is concealment a failure of honesty or a legitimate defense against injustice?).
Worked comparison of a surface image: Gilman: "this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind." Dunbar: "We wear the mask that grins and lies." Similarity: each names the surface through which the hidden self is managed (paper, a mask). Difference: Gilman's paper receives the truth she cannot say; Dunbar's mask conceals the truth from the world. Analysis: in Gilman, the private surface is where the self survives until the public one breaks; in Dunbar, the public surface protects a self shown only to God.
Worked analysis of the endings: Gilman ends with the narrator creeping over her fainted husband: "I've got out at last... so you can't put me back!" Dunbar ends "But let the world dream otherwise, / We wear the mask!" Gilman's ending is a breaking-through that is also a collapse; Dunbar's is a refusal to break through, and the exclamation point makes that refusal defiant. The contrast shows two answers from the same decade to the question of what happens to a concealed self.
Worked scaffolded reading of one line: "Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sighs?" Step 1, vocabulary: "over-wise" means knowing too much, or presuming to know. Step 2, grammar: a rhetorical question expecting the answer "it should not." Step 3, background: a poem of the 1890s by a Black poet whose parents had been enslaved. Step 4, paraphrase: we will not let the world tally our suffering. Step 5, connection (societal): whom does a society ask to perform contentment? A grade 11 reader uses the steps with support; a grade 12 reader chooses and applies such strategies independently, without teacher-provided scaffolds, on texts at the high end of the band.
Period map and theme chart: On a timeline from 1773 to 1916, place the ten works on the period map with their dates. Then make a two-column chart comparing Gilman and Dunbar on: the surface, what it hides, who imposes it, who sees behind it, the ending, and the form. Quote each text in every row.
Independent performance: Write a 700–900-word essay analyzing how "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and "We Wear the Mask" treat the theme of a concealed self. Success criteria: the essay demonstrates knowledge of the period by placing both works accurately in time and naming at least two other foundational works and quoting at least one passage from an eighteenth- or early-twentieth-century work (such as the Wheatley lines or Trifles); both texts are quoted at least four times, no quotation longer than two lines of poetry or forty words of prose; the similarity is stated as a precise theme, not a topic; at least two meaningful differences are analyzed, including a difference in form; the essay does not reduce the different pressures of gender and race to one; one personal, one societal and one ethical connection deepen the analysis.
Independent reading log: Read one complete additional work from the period map (a story, a drama or a group of poems). Record the scaffolds you used (glossary, background notes, paraphrase) and mark which ones you no longer needed by the end. Write one paragraph naming the background knowledge you had to build and how it changed your reading.
An adult may read the prompts aloud. Answer independently with words, objects, drawings or a demonstration before opening the answer guide. Award 1 point for a correct result or claim and 1 point for a matching explanation or demonstration; where a question asks only for a result (a corrected sentence, a spelling, a count), a fully correct result earns both points, and the answer guide shows what a complete response contains. Record prompting separately. The total (two points per question) is local practice feedback, not an Ohio proficiency level.
Name the similar theme that “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and “We Wear the Mask” treat, and quote one line from each that shows it.
Both treat a person forced to hide the true self behind a surface others accept. Gilman: “I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it.” Dunbar: “We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.”
Explain how the parenthesis in “perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper...)—perhaps” enacts Gilman’s theme.
The opinion itself, that John’s being a physician may be “one reason I do not get well faster,” stands outside the parentheses; what the dashes and brackets enclose is her aside about secrecy. The interruption delays and hedges the admission, so the punctuation performs the concealment the story is about: even in her private journal she must first reassure herself that she is writing to “dead paper,” not speaking aloud.
How does Dunbar’s treatment of concealment differ from Gilman’s? Give two differences with evidence.
First, Dunbar’s mask is collective, a shared strategy worn under pressure, “We wear the mask,” paid as a “debt... to human guile,” while Gilman’s narrator is a single voice whose silence is enforced by her husband and doctors, though she too conceals strategically, “having to be so sly about it.” Second, Dunbar’s concealment is kept up to the end and the true self is shown only to God, “our cries / To thee from tortured souls arise,” while Gilman’s breaks through destructively: “I’ve got out at last... you can’t put me back!”
Why is it important not to treat the two texts as saying the same thing?
They describe different pressures: a marriage and medical authority over a white middle-class woman, and a racial order bearing on Black Americans in the 1890s. Comparing them shows how the same figure, a concealing surface, reveals different injustices; flattening them would erase what each text specifically exposes.
Place both works accurately in their period and name one earlier nineteenth-century work each might be read against.
Gilman’s story was published in 1892 and Dunbar’s poem in 1895, both late nineteenth century. Gilman might be read against Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), which also examines public judgment and private truth; Dunbar against Douglass’s Narrative (1845), which also exposes what a racial order demands its victims conceal.
What background knowledge helps a reader comprehend “We Wear the Mask,” and how does it deepen understanding?
Knowing that Dunbar, born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872, was the son of formerly enslaved parents and wrote during the expansion of legally enforced segregation helps a reader understand whom “we” refers to and why the mask is a survival strategy rather than simple dishonesty. Without it, a reader may take the poem only as a general comment on hiding feelings: a reading the unnamed “we” permits, but one that misses the poem’s historically specific stakes.
Make one ethical connection to either text and explain how it deepens understanding rather than replacing analysis.
Ethical question from Dunbar: is concealment dishonest, or a legitimate defense against an unjust world? The poem’s refusal to let the world go “counting all our tears and sighs” suggests that honesty is owed where there is justice, not to those who exploit it. The connection deepens understanding because it tests the text’s claim rather than substituting a personal story for it.
How does Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773) treat the gap between an accepted surface and an uninvited claim, and how does that connect it to Dunbar and Gilman?
Wheatley writes in the pious, grateful voice her readers would accept, in polished couplets, yet she reports and quotes their prejudice, “Some view our sable race with scornful eye, / ‘Their colour is a diabolic die,’” and answers it with a command: “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.” The accepted surface carries a rebuke. Like Dunbar’s mask, the form lets a claim reach a hostile audience; unlike Gilman’s journal, the claim is made in public, though inside a voice the audience approves. A strong answer may also read the gratitude as sincere; the rebuke in the closing couplet stands on either reading. A complete answer quotes both the reported prejudice and the closing command and makes one precise comparison with Dunbar and one with Gilman.