From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, November 24, 1997
Freshmen study extraterrestrials
By Mary Caffrey
In a delicate hand not seen today, the 18th-century astronomer Sir William Herschel pondered the accepted relationship between the Earth and the Moon:
"When we call our Earth a planet and the Moon a satellite, we should consider whether we do not perhaps mistake the matter, in a certain sense. Perhaps, and not unlikely, the Moon is the planet and the Earth the satellite."
A group of freshmen struggled with Herschel's penmanship, which offers the only access to a journal that was never published. Studying handwritten work is not a typical assignment for first-year students, but these Butler College freshmen volunteered.
Welcome to Extraterrestrial Life and Literature, an offering from the Program of Freshman Seminars in the Residential Colleges being taught by Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Eileen Reeves. Now in its 11th year, the Freshman Seminars series lets first-year students explore a topic in depth with a faculty member, and it lets faculty members explore topics not often found in a college catalog.
Speculation since Galileo
Reeves' interest in tales of outer space evolved from her research on Galileo (1564-1642), whose offhand speculation that there might be intelligent life elsewhere encouraged many to think and write what that life might be like, particularly on the Moon and on Mars.
"It turned into a cottage industry," Reeves said. While modern fans of extraterrestrial fiction might associate it with film and television, Reeves notes that since Galileo's time, "You can find examples from every century."
As her freshman students saw, such speculation was not limited to poets and novelists. Herschel, who discovered the planet Uranus, was highly regarded; his musings about the Moon, complete with accounts of volcanos and "turn-pike roads," appear in private journals that Reeves said would have caused great embarrassment had they been published. "They're not at all what you would associate with a prominent scientist," she said.
Despite the difficulties of reading the microfilm, Reeves' students clearly saw the connections between Sir William Herschel's entries and the "moon hoax" of 1835, ostensibly based on observations made in South Africa by his son, astronomer Sir John Herschel. The New York Sun published a five-part series called "Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope," which included illustrations of creatures "living" on the moon.
The Moon Hoax highlights a theme of the freshman seminar, that writings about other worlds, particularly utopian ones, say much about the era when they appeared and the audience that read them. Reeves' students discussed how American readers soaked up the Moon Hoax, with its South African links and its talk of "dark people," as the debate over slavery escalated. Another example: Aliens in 19th-century Western literature were often depicted with Asian features, because "the Orient" was the most exotic place that Westerners knew.
Male scientists, female dreamers
The class also examined gender roles in the genre. In literature about extraterrestrials, men are typically the scientists searching for proof, while women are often depicted as the dreamers. Female characters believe
in the possibility of a utopia elsewhere, because they are looking for a better version of reality, Reeves said. However, in this literature "the female's enthusiasm tends to get out of hand. It always has to be tamed." Believers also emerge among other "untamable" classes, such as the poor.
This theme still appears today, Reeves notes. In the film Independence Day, the person who climbs atop a tall building to welcome the aliens is a female, an exotic dancer. And when actress Jodie Foster landed the starring role of the scientist in the movie Contact, she called it "the boy's part."
In the seminar, science forms a bridge to a broader historical and cultural context -- which is what many of the freshmen sought. Reeves observed that students who wrote essays for admission to the class indicated they were interested in the topic because "they had not previously thought about a purely scientific issue any other way."
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