Abstract

The assignment from Dr. Logan:  

An abstract is a summary of a scholarly work.  Your abstract will be followed by analysis, linking the scholar’s argument to your proposed project.  Please attach a PDF* of your chosen text to the email when you hand it in.

*I’ve embedded the GoogleBooks preview of Stabile’s book here.


[Submitted 15 October 2010]

Stabile, Susan M.  "Introduction: The Genealogy of Memory."  Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America.  NY: Cornell UP, 2004.  1-16. Print.

Stabile’s introduction opens with “glossing over historical realities,” citing the destruction of Deborah Logan’s house to make way for the Second Bank of the United States as an example.  This example illuminates the tension between domestic and public memory existing in early American national history.  Women approach national memory building via genealogical associations grounded in the family and the home.  Stabile defines these associations as “the local, the particular, the domestic” (4).  Women’s aim, unlike men’s, is to accurately recreate the historical record, without the intent to invoke the past and fashion the future (4).  Logan is known by her peers as “a celebrated keeper of cultural memory,” prized for her “careful transcription, preservation, and publication of historical manuscripts” (4)*1.  Stabile explores the etymology of archive, introducing its dual function: “both a physical place and a metaphor for memory” (8).  The thesis of the book is clear, to return the archive to its “properly domestic origins,” allowing the house to become “a site of memory, history and knowledge” (9).  In addition, this relocation exposes the preservation, rather than petrifying, of cultural memory, placing women in the center of early American history, rescuing them from exile on the outskirts (9).  Included are brief biographies of Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson and Annis Boudinot Stockton, plus their intertwining webs of kinship and friendship.  Stabile refers to women’s use and adaptation of the commonplace book genre, stating “the commonplace book recuperates the house, and the female mind, as locales of knowledge and memory” (10).  The commonplace book is simultaneously a physical object representing rhetorical topi and a text, embodying “the very stuff of memory making” (15).  The women of early American history characterize “commonplacing and other domestic arts” as a distinctly feminine art, demonstrating a subversive strategy to reunite women, memory, and knowledge.

By relocating the archive, and thereby the house, to their “proper domestic origins,” Stabile opens the floodgates of analysis for a feminist perspective of the role of memory and archiving in early American history/literature.  She validates and attaches value to the art of commonplacing and other domestic arts which our patriarchal-biased history stripped away over the course of time.  By including unpublished texts and domestic artifacts, Stabile forcibly expands the canon of early American women’s literature.  Her approach is interdisciplinary: architectural theory plays a large role in the book, and sources include historic house museums, societies dedicated to historic preservation, and experts on “early American textiles, metals, and furniture” (xi).  Questions that Stabile’s introduction provoked: in what way does MMMB challenge the creation of a “national memory”?*2  How does Stabile’s concept of archive complicate and/or compliment the genre of commonplace books?  Is MMMB subversive?  Does Moore appear in the later chapters and did she know Deborah Logan?


Footnotes:
1.  This description is almost identical to the ones used to describe Milcah Martha Moore in MMMB.
2.  Stabile describes national memory: “The construction of a ‘national memory’ demands consensus, imposing a ‘duty to remember’ in a kind of fixed and reverential relationship to the past.  At the same time, it requires material reminders for future veneration” (3).