Lisa Logan, Univ. of Central Florida

Handout for “Writing Lives in the Early Americas”

Teaching Elizabeth Ashbridge’s Narrative

1. Cultural Conventions (Spiritual Autobiography)

· Tenets of Quaker Autobiography (Carol Edkins, “Quest for Commuity: Spiritual Autobiographies of Eighteenth-Century Quaker and Puritan Women.” In Estelle C. Jelinek, ed. Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980).

o Early intimations of religious questioning

o Attempt to find religious life in prevailing doctrines

o A record of first knowledge of Quakers

o Struggle against surrender to God and the Quaker community

o Submission

o Entry into and defense of the Society of Friends

· Daniel Shea’s list of characteristics of Quaker autobiography (from Spiritual Autobiography in Early America. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988).

o Records individual life for the instruction of others

o Reveals the self as “Friend” (Quaker) first, then an individual writing self

o Demonstrates how Quaker piety requires the individual to subordinate will to the “Light”

o Grants impersonal status of Truth to dreams and visions

o Individual self valued but also subordinated to larger spiritual community

2. What do these conventions enable and/or disable??

• Enable a space for literary/historical consideration of women’s life writing
• Focus on gendered experience of young girl/woman in England/Anglo-America
• Provide a metaphor for struggle with husband (struggle with God and the Devil)
• Lends authority to this struggle (beyond husband’s rule and wife’s (dis) obedience
• Opening for other kinds of collateral discussions (which I’ll talk about now)

3. Another model:

A “Blueprint” for Reading Women’s Autobiographies and Diaries:

1. What role does the audience assume for the writer? How does she address the diary/audience?

2. What is repeated?

3. What organizing ideas shape the persona? What symbols come to represent the subject?

4. What actions are repeated and how do these create structure?

5. Look for “silences” in the text—places where the text doesn’t say something.

--(Margo Culley, ed. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present. New York: Feminist Press, 1985.)

4. How does EA challenge/resist or conform to categories of life writing??
• Woman-centeredness of autobiography and criticism
• Critical responses focus on the extent to which EA’s life writing enables her” agency”
• Life writing as a tool of vindication (Liahna Baebner)
• She’s indentured to God (not husband/master) (William Schieck)
• Boundedness not the same thing as bondage (Daniel Shea)

• In other words, this strategy of critical approach ends up asking if the writing voice/self/subject is enabled or constrained by the discursive conventions and practices that underpin it.

5. Is there a way for the critic to write beyond this binary of transgression/subversion vs. conservation?

• Language of negotiation, mediation, a “third term”

Etta Madden’s work “Quaker EA as the ‘Spectacle and Discourse of the Company.’” EAL 34 (1999): 171-89. Focuses on the bodily discourses present in the narrative that challenge the spiritual

· Madden and other critics focus on performativity and theatrical aspects of the text, which reforms several binaries

o Reason, emotion

o Self, other

o Mind, body

· Etta Madden’s strategy of synecdoche in reading tavern scene as a microcosm of the narrative’s structural questioning of binaries

· Negotiation of women’s roles as woman, wife, spiritual/political/social person

· Using Margo Culley’s impetus to look for either silences or gaps or patterns of negotiation

6. Sample assignments (for Web-based discussion forums or short 2-3 page essays)

· Imagine a conversation between Ashbridge and either Bradstreet or Rowlandson about religious or gender issues

· Take one scene (synecdoche) and read closely in context of whole

· Is there a way to apply this strategy across cultural borders?? How women’s discursive practices or the practices of selves that the culture typically constructs as other winds up mapping larger issues of the early American self/identity?