Paper Proposal

The assignment from Dr. Logan:


Call for Papers!  LIT 6216:  Unruly Women in Early American Literature.

The organizers of the LIT 6216 Scholars Group announce a call for papers to be presented at its final graduate student conference on Tuesday, December 7, 2010 from 7-9:50 p.m.  The conference will explore representations of women as transgressive or unruly; “unruly” is understood in a broad sense in the context of early American gender norms.  Topics might include women whose experiences were out of the ordinary (captivity, travel, etc.), women who broke laws or defied dominant cultural mores and/or values, cross-dressing women, etc.  Exploration of different textual forms  is welcome, including sentimental or historical novels, speeches, conversion narratives, crime and execution narratives,  short fiction, autobiography (including diaries memoirs, journals), biography, letters, poetry, etc.  Papers should engage with the scholarly conversation in early American literary studies, including a knowledge of the historical and cultural context in which the text was produced.   Please send questions and/or submit your abstract to Dr. Lisa M. Logan by 10/22/10.

Conference format:  Papers for this conference will be circulated beforehand and discussed (rather than read) at the conference meeting. 

See Research Project Components for more details.

[Submitted 24 October 2010]

Jay Jay Stroup
Graduate Student, UCF
jayjaystroup@knights.ucf.edu

Bonds of Intimacy: 
Locating the Female Homosocial & Lesbian Continuum in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book

The modern critical edition of Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, published in 1997, exposes previously ignored women’s writing in early American literature.  Moore’s commonplace book, an unpublished, non-traditional format, is now accessible to all scholars.  While Catherine Blecki and Karin Wulf provide invaluable scholarship regarding the culture of the Philadelphia, as well as manuscript and print culture during the Revolutionary era, there is no mention of Queer or Feminist theory.  The possibility of locating the female homosocial and lesbian continuum in MMMB is hinted at through Blecki’s and Wulf’s multiple references to female friendship, but not made explicit.  It is my intent to strengthen these references through the use of Queer and Feminist theories, and explore the physical object of Moore’s commonplace book as a site of the female homosocial and lesbian continuum in early American literature.     

Moore’s commonplace book simultaneously preserves the work of Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson and establishes a female homosocial presence through the dominance of female authorship within the text.  Out of the one hundred and twenty six entries, sixty three of them are authored by Griffitts (exactly fifty percent of the entries), twenty five are authored by Wright, and three by Graeme Fergusson.  Though other themes are represented, the text opens with “An Essay on Friendship” by Griffitts, thereby signaling the tone and theme of the work as a whole.  Through the use of Susan Stabile’s scholarship on the relationship between memory and the archive, and commonplacing as a distinctly feminized art I argue that not only does the text operate on the lesbian continuum, it also transgresses normative female behavior for colonial America in terms of reading and authorship.  I am relying on the scholarship of Kevin J. Hayes (A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf) to provide evidence of normative and transgressive reading experiences of women during colonial America.   

Adrienne Rich’s "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" highlights the way in which behavior not ascribing to strict hetero-normative standards is punished, the concept of which is transferable to MMMB: Griffitts and Wright refuse to marry, Moore is thrown out of the Society of Friends for marriage to a cousin, and Graeme Fergusson’s secret marriage to a Tory ruins her economically, socially, and politically.  While Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America" deals with literature and behavior of the 1800s, there are markers of the female homosocial and lesbian continuum that are also applicable to MMMB, specifically in the entries dealing with female friendship.  

By focusing the lens of Queer theory on a commonplace book from early American literature, strategies of defiance and non-compliance by women in regards to their sexuality, readership and authorship are brought to light.  It is the strategies of defiance contained within that classify MMMB as an unruly text, authored and edited by unruly women.  Re-identifying the commonplace book as a site of the female homosocial expands, rather than contracts, the possibilities for future scholarship.  This identification invites and encourages the co-mingling of other schools of theory – feminist, racial, cultural, historical, economical and more.