ABSTRACT
Enabling the imagination of radically different futures might seem a grandiose goal for a literary history devoted to the writing and careers of a handful of women, none of them famous, in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. Nonetheless, my goal in this study has been to contribute to what Grosz calls “a history of singularity and particularity, a history that defies repeatability or generalization and that welcomes the surprise of the future as it makes clear the specificities and particularities, the events, of history” (1018). While this study takes up, in order to revise, several historiographical narratives, my intention is not to produce a seamless new narrative of American women’s literary history, but rather to challenge the process by which, in the writing of history, we discover the past to be exactly what we suspected it was all along: the necessary precursor of the present. The moment in literary history whose story I aim to tell in these pages does not inevitably lead to our present; indeed, the moment with which I am concerned seems discontinuous in certain crucial ways with the moment that immediately follows.1 Specifically, this study traces women’s participation in a broad spectrum of literary activities during the half-century surrounding the Revolution, in order to complicate and challenge a number of critical commonplaces: a narrative of American literary history that presents the novel as women’s entrée into authorship; dichotomized views of civic and commercial authorship and of manuscript and print cultures; and a persistent sense that women of letters constantly struggled against a literary world that begrudged them entrance based on their gender. These understandings of early American women writers are hard to resist, since they help to create a coherent narrative of women’s writing that leads to Hawthorne’s infamous “scribbling women.” That narrative is precisely what this study aims to challenge, in each of its dimensions. For the generation of
women who lived and wrote during the decades surrounding the Revolution, I argue, the novel was by no means the most important genre. Civic, social, and commercial motivations for writing or publishing frequently commingled; manuscript culture and print culture bled into each other. Finally, whatever stigma intellectual and literary interests carried was insufficient to outweigh the rewards of writing, circulating manuscripts, and publishing in print. Because this view of Revolutionary women’s experience of authorship does not square easily with many narratives of American literary history, this chapter of the story of American writing merits closer scrutiny. In order to present as full a picture as possible of women’s authorship in Revolutionary America, the current study will take a cross-genre approach that might seem to offer scant attention to the novel. American women did, of course, both write and read novels. As Cathy Davidson demonstrated in her groundbreaking Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986), women and their identities as both writers and readers were crucial to the development of the novel in the early Republic.2 The genre was associated with women, and critiques of the novel often focused on its danger for women readers. Davidson’s purpose, however, was to study the post-Revolutionary growth of the novel, not solely women novelists, and a consideration of the hundred or so novels she examined reminds us quickly that the majority of early American novelslike the majority of other published writings in this era-were authored by men. Women’s production of novels was roughly proportional to their work in other popular genres, including poetry, essays, plays, and history. Indeed, with the exception of Susanna Rowson, the American women writers of this generation who sustained the longest and most prolific writing careers-Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, Mercy Otis Warren, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Annis Boudinot Stockton, Hannah Adams-published no novels.3 If it seems clear that women were crucial to the novel, it does not necessarily follow that the novel was crucial to women writers. Judging by the volume of published scholarship on women’s novels, particularly compared with the scholarship on women’s writing in other genres, it would be easy to lose sight of the fact that the novel was a comparatively minor part of American women’s writings before the nineteenth century. This problem is compounded by the fact that writers interested in the growth (or decline) of writing as a tool of civic participation have largely ignored women writers aside from their work as novelists. In The Letters of the Republic (1990), Michael Warner argues that participation in public discourse was intimately connected to the construction of the new Republic; ranging broadly over a number of writers, he treats women writers only in his final chapter on the novel. Implicitly, Warner accepts a version of literary history in which the novel is the vehicle by which women enter the public sphere. Grantland Rice in The Transformation of Authorship in America (1993) narrates a shift from civic to commercial authorship that counters Warner’s, arguing that civic authorship flourished more
before than after the Revolution; despite the critical differences, Rice mirrors Warner’s inattention to women writers other than novelists. Similar patterns appear in other works interested in public discourse as constituent of the American national identity.4 From a perusal of such works, a reader unfamiliar with the primary texts of the period might well surmise that women writers were, before the rise of the novel, essentially silent.5 The scant attention paid in broader studies of early American literary culture to women’s writings in genres other than the novel has in large part been redressed by the revitalized scholarship interested specifically in women writers that has flourished since the 1980s. In addition to broadening our sense of the genres in which women worked, this scholarship has also drawn attention to women’s participation in both print and manuscript-focused literary cultures. Since most of these writers’ works have been out of print for decades if not centuries, much of the most important scholarship has appeared in introductions to new editions. Initially, the most attractive works for new editions were those that had appeared in print during the authors’ lifetimes.6 The most important contributions to a new understanding of the nature of authorship for Revolutionary American women writers have been those studies that have reevaluated manuscript circulation as a literary practice and challenged the dichotomy of “private” (unpublished) and “public” (printed) texts. Carla Mulford’s edition of the poetry of Annis Boudinot Stockton (Only for the Eye of a Friend, 1995) demonstrates that the presumably “private” performances of literary women could function as a type of public performance equivalent to publication. Mulford traces the significance of manuscript transmission as a type of publication within a literary network, arguing that Stockton’s writing was intended for an audience among whom she developed an impressive literary reputation. Building on Mulford’s work, Catherine Blecki and Karin Wulf’s Milcah Martha Moore’s Book (1997) reveals the “private” writings of a highly talented and ambitious group of women writers from the Revolutionary era. The evidence of these two editions suggests that manuscript culture was an important venue for women who wanted to display their literary talent and participate in literary culture. In his study of the culture of sociability in early America, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (1997), David Shields reveals the deep involvement of many women in the culture of manuscript circulation and the institutions that supported it. Most recently, Susan Stabile’s Memory’s Daughters (2004) examines the writing of the Philadelphia coterie of which Elizabeth Fergusson and Annis Stockton were a part. The work of Mulford, Shields, Stabile, and Blecki and Wulf has brought into sharp relief the prominence of coterie-centered forms of discourse, especially manuscript circulation. The renewed focus on manuscript culture and its highly social nature places in sharp relief the limitations of approaches to authorship that privilege print and individualistic, Romantic ideals of authorship, a critique that has also been taken up in recent scholarship on the history of authorship. Foucault’s observation that “the coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes a privileged moment
of individualization” in Western culture (141) suggests that, in addition to a famous death in the twentieth century, the author must have had a birth at some point in history. While new historicism, cultural studies, and poststructuralism have all helped to reveal the inevitably social nature of texts, the fact and force of the “author function” remains, and literary and book historians have attempted to write the life history of The Author considered as individual. One strand of thinking, following Foucault, views the position of author as consolidating with the rise of capitalism; the eighteenth century, with its rapidly expanding market for printed materials as consumer commodities, is seen as calling into being the position of author as unitary, individualistic creator. In its nuances, however, this narrative-and its underlying model of development-is constantly complicated by exceptions. We can find the celebration of author as individual at least as early as Chaucer, while collaborative models of authorship never, despite appearances to the contrary, disappear (in the twentieth century, for example, the complications of the Eliot-Pound relationship constitute only one of the most notorious examples). Moreover, as Robert Griffin has pointed out, long traditions of anonymous and pseudonymous publication, coexisting with traditions that privilege the author’s name, challenge a narrative that sees Foucault’s link between authorship and individuality as a sudden change occurring in the eighteenth century (3-5). To understand authorship at a given point in time, then, it’s necessary to account for the relationship between models of authorship that privilege the individual and those that subordinate the identity of the author, whether through collaborative models of authorship or through anonymity or pseudonymity. With the establishment of copyright laws early in the century in Britain and at the end of the century in the United States, it should come as no surprise that studies of eighteenth-century authorship have assumed a growing commercial motivation for authorship. Early scholarship on authorship in the United States tended to define authorship as the pursuit of writing as a financially viable profession, and thus to concern itself with the material and economic conditions that enabled such a profession beginning in the 1790s.7
