The assigned texts for this course barely scratch the surface of literary representations of women in early America. As scholars of American literature, we will investigate this field more deeply by conducting primary and secondary research and developing projects that add original insight to the conversation about this topic. To that end, each of you will choose for your research project one text (or set of texts, in some instances) from those listed (separate handout), all of which are lesser-known and infrequently taught. You will then spend the semester completing successive stages of a research project on this novel, from learning the publication history of the text to developing an initial bibliography using various databases to writing abstracts of critical articles to completing and peer-reviewing drafts and presenting your work at a final LIT 6216 conference, to be held during the final exam period.
Bonds of Intimacy:
The Female Homosocial and Lesbian Continuum in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book
The 1997 modern critical edition of Milcah Martha Moore’s Book (hereafter MMMB) makes accessible previously ignored women’s writing in early American literature through Moore’s commonplace book, a rare example of the non-traditional format. I say non-traditional in that the commonplace book existed in manuscript rather than printed form, and because the genre’s origins are closely tied to the education of men. The commonplace books by male authors of this time period have received critical attention; women’s commonplace books are, more recently, pushed into the scholarly spotlight. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf, the editors, provide invaluable scholarship regarding the cultural, social, manuscript, and print culture of revolutionary Philadelphia and emphasize the bonds of friendship connecting the contributing authors and editor of the manuscript. This essay extends Blecki’s and Wulf’s reading of female friendship by using feminist theories to explore the physical object of Moore’s commonplace book as a site of the female homosocial and lesbian continuum. This argument is strengthened by a selective reading of friendship themed prose and verse entries from MMMB.
I argue that Moore’s commonplace book preserves the work of Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, thereby establishing a female homosocial presence through the dominance of female authorship within the text. 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. Drawing on literary scholarship of Susan Stabile and Ivy Schweitzer, feminist scholarship of Adrienne Rich and Eve Sedgwick, and history of the book scholarship from Kevin J. Hayes, I illustrate the relationship between the strategies of defiance and non-compliance in regards to the readership, authorship, and female friendship in MMMB and the ways in which these relationships create a female homosocial space.
Reading Practices in Colonial America
Understanding the how and why of Moore’s commonplace book transgression requires a quick diversion to colonial women’s reading habits and practices. First, it is important to realize that reading and writing are separate skill sets for colonial women; some could read but not write: “. . . American women were reading long before they were writing and publishing novels . . . their chosen literary genres, by and large, were more appropriate for circulation in manuscript among small groups of friends and neighbors” (Hayes 3). The female contributors to Moore’s commonplace book were able to read and write. The attempt to control women’s reading practices is reflected through many mediums, most visibly through conduct and religious literature. Kevin J. Hayes, author of A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf, states “[t]he inextricable link between reading and salvation made it virtually impossible for any colonial American to suggest seriously that women should not read; on the other hand, the equality of souls hardly created educational equality. Women, it was generally believed, did not need to read as much or as widely as men” (2-3). Perhaps then, it is not surprising that a large portion of MMMB is verse dedicated to religious issues of God, faith, and piety. It should be noted, as well, that many women challenged and violated the cultural restrictions set against them; I will go into more detail in the section titled “Female Friendship Poems in MMMB.”
In spite of educational inequality, Wright, Griffitts, Moore, and Graeme Fergusson were avid readers and writers. Wright “. . . read widely and exchanged books and correspondence, including poetry, with friends and relatives” (MMMB xvi) and served as a poetical mentor to Griffitts. Griffitts “. . . devoted her life to poetry” (MMMB xvii) and gained fame as a Quaker poet in the Philadelphia community, especially for her memorial poetry and satire pieces regarding the American Revolutionary War. Moore, Wulf tells us, from a young age “. . . sent her correspondents prose and poetry” (MMMB 22) and letter writing functioned to keep in close communication with family and friends in a trans-Atlantic world. In addition to her three surviving commonplace books, one of which is MMMB, in 1787 Moore published Miscellanies, Moral and Instructive which functioned as a school textbook (Wulf 60, 69). Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s library had 400 volumes, according to court records, 130 of which were lent to her by her gentlemen friends (Hayes 22). Hayes speculates, “[t]he court record reveals her familiarity with colonial Philadelphia’s literary men. They were willing to encourage her studies by loaning her books, and she was enthusiastic enough about the books that she was reluctant to return them” (22). Further proof of her defiance of “proper” reading practices surfaces in the surviving correspondence of Graeme Fergusson, as “. . . others recognized her bookish interests” (Hayes 21). Rather than form a picture of complete domination of women’s reading habits, Hayes’s careful research reveals women (and men) employing strategies of non-compliance to further their education, often in cooperation across the sexes.
The commonplace book [1], as a genre, was originally entirely in the domain of men, specifically as a tool for educating school boys, dating back to the classical Greek models of education (Stabile 12). Colonial women adopted the genre and used it for their own purposes, as evidenced by Moore’s commonplace book. In Susan Stabile’s Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America, the manner in which women usurped the genre reveals their non-compliance with their culture’s norms of female reading:
Exemplified by their manuscript commonplace books, women’s memory practices adapted the eighteenth century’s new modes of learning based on accumulation, order, and classification into a feminine art of collecting . . . Making learning more readily available to women, commonplacing was an invaluable method of reading and storing information in the early United States. (12)
While some women had access to formal schooling, many did not and commonplacing appears to act as a substitute for methods of instruction amongst women; Stabile states that the genre “. . . initiated a feminine genealogy of learning” (12). Stabile effectively argues that commonplace books became gendered and feminized by colonial women; if this assumption is accepted, then the presence of the female homosocial in MMMB is no longer surprising for what better place to showcase social bonds between women than a recently conquered genre?
Moore, in the creation of her commonplace book, is following in the footsteps of her literary sisters according to Stabile, “[b]y adapting commonplacing and other domestic arts into a feminine art of artificial memory, these well-educated, privileged, literary women forwarded a unique way of knowing, which undercut, subverted, and reapplied what might be understood as a limited female intellectual capacity” (16). Not only are the MMMB contributors unruly and culturally defiant, but the physical object itself is transgressive. Stabile’s chapter “Pen, Ink, and Memory” in Memory’s Daughters illuminates the immense amount of literature concerning penmanship, especially for women, that existed in colonial America and the ways in which Deborah Logan (a niece of Hannah Griffitts) ignored such advice. Blecki and Wulf praise the neat penmanship of Moore and Stabile provides insight, stating “[v]aluing privacy over secrecy, and preservation over concealment, the Philadelphia coterie made legibility—and indeed, even transparency—requisite to its mnemonic arts” (110). The purpose of Moore’s commonplace book was the circulation amongst family, friends and community, hence the care she took in legibility.
Homosocial refers to the “. . . social bonds between people of the same sex” (The Columbia Dictionary 138) and the female homosocial deals specifically with female social bonds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes the female homosocial as “. . . an intelligible continuum of aims, emotions, and valuations [that] links lesbianism with the other forms of women’s attention to women: the bond of mother and daughter, for instance, the bond of sister and sister, woman’s friendship, ‘networking,’ and the active struggles of feminism” (2). In contrast to the male homosocial, Sedgwick argues, “. . . the adjective ‘homosocial’ as applied to women’s bonds (by, for example, historical Carroll Smith-Rosenberg) need not be pointedly dichotomized as against ‘homosexual’; it can intelligibly denominate the entire continuum” (3). In Adrienne Rich’s landmark essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” she retitles these female homosocial ties as the lesbian continuum and claims a spectrum of behavior bracketed by sexual and non-sexual women to women relationships. She calls for an approach in which “. . . the institution of heterosexuality itself as a beachhead of male dominance” (633) is examined; I disagree. The practice of defining women’s relationships with one another set against male domination seems to argue against a feminist approach. However, I should point out one of Rich’s goals is to “. . . deal with lesbian existence as a reality, and as a source of knowledge and power available to women” whereas I am looking to prove the existence of a female homosocial space and the possibility of the lesbian continuum rather than locate specific instances of lesbianism (633). I am not arguing to ignore historical, cultural, and social context, especially as I believe textual evidence from MMMB supports the co-existence of bonds of primary intensity between women and colonial culture’s insistence on heterosexuality (through marriage). The poems and prose entries on female friendship offer a glimpse of the strategies Griffitts, Wright, and Graeme Fergusson employed in a culture that expected women to marry men, not stay single or voluntarily separate from their husbands.
Griffitts remained single, refusing to marry as did Wright. Moore married her cousin, Dr. Charles Moore during a period of Quaker reform (1750s) and was disowned by the Society of Friends despite the fact that her sister had also married a cousin twenty years prior [2]. Moore remained childless, and scholars Blecki and Wulf suspect the high levels of intermarriage amongst the Philadelphia Quakers could be a contributing factor. Though she was unable to participate in official Quaker activities, Moore kept in touch with her religious family and friends, through letters and visits, and rejoined the church after her husband’s death. Graeme Fergusson was engaged to William Franklin (Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son) but he broke off their engagement (although, some scholars suggest she broke it off, see David S. Shields, 138). She secretly married Henry Hugh Fergusson, who supported the Loyalist cause. They spent a scant two years together before her husband’s political affiliations forced him to flee to England—she refused to leave and suffered through a bitter battle to recover her estate from the American government after it was seized during the war (Wulf 54). Graeme Fergusson never remarried nor had children. These four women experienced heterosexual norms in different ways and yet cultivated intense friendships with each other, as evidenced by the entries in MMMB.
In Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature, Ivy Schweitzer asserts that friendship is “. . . a historically situated, politically inflected cultural practice” (3). Therefore, it is important to look at the ways in which friendship functioned in colonial America to prevent imposing modern Victorian beliefs and sexual regulations upon the friendship models found in MMMB. Americans adapted their model of friendship from the classical, Aristotelian model, though it was subject to American influence and adaptation:
. . . the American Revolution and its Enlightenment ideas were supposed to have swept away Puritan zeal, predestinarian gloom, and top-down relations of obligation in order to install rationalism, egalitarianism, and liberty in their place. During the eighteenth century, thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic began reconceiving bonds of passion and coercive authority, especially those between parent and child and husband and wife, as mutually sustaining, affectionate, and consensual ‘contracts’ modeled on the voluntary egalitarianism of friendship. But . . . women have been excluded historically and philosophically from friendship with men and have had their same-sex bonds trivialized. (23)
The challenge to top-down relations and traditional bonds are present within MMMB’s entries on female friendship, and are perhaps fueled by Moore’s, Wright’s, and Griffitt’s participation in the Society of Friends. The Quakers traditionally defy such top-down relations and often encouraged their members to form the voluntary bonds of friendship as described above. Thus cultural unruliness is condoned and encouraged by the Quaker religion, especially in Philadelphia where an intense Quaker culture circulated “. . . ideas about women’s activities that could challenge broader cultural notions emphasizing women’s responsibilities for exclusively domestic roles” (Wulf 12). The ideal friendship operates on “. . . the elemental principle that like attracts like” and therefore “. . . friendship typically implies parity, symmetry, spirituality, and self-affirmation through rational desire and free choice rather than hierarchy, physicality, and self-loss or self-dilution through irrational and uncontrollable passion or forced alliance” (Schweitzer 9). These character traits, “. . . similarity, equality, and interchangeability,” appear throughout the history of friendship, and are easily located within MMMB (Schweitzer 28).
Though the perfect friendship is supposed to be one of equals, in terms of “. . . social rank as well as age and sex” (Schweitzer 3), the biographical and historical scholarship available on the four main contributors to MMMB indicates adaptation and negotiation of these requirements. Wright served as “. . . a kind of elder stateswoman” to Griffitt’s and Moore’s generation (Wulf 27) and acted in the role of mentor to Griffitts in her poetical career. Fergusson is the only non-Quaker of the four, although she was a Christian and Wulf informs us, she was “. . . by far the most cosmopolitan of the group. She traveled abroad and her writing reflected the widest variety and most secular of literary fashions” (27). Despite their differences, it is “. . . mutual interests in reading and writing poetry and prose” (29) that creates their bonds of friendship, reinforcing and strengthening Wulf’s claim to the significant relationship between women’s literacy and their ability to form same-sex relationships (1). Thus, Moore’s commonplace book, as a physical archive of these relationships, creates a female homosocial space in American literary history and history itself.
Schweitzer raises an important issue regarding the homosocial aspect of this classical friendship model, stating “[b]ut if such representations provide a window into the existence of same-sex affiliations, it is a view frequently obscured from the gaze of critics by supposedly racier narratives of heterosexual romance, miscegenation, and reproduction” (5). She goes on to explain that critics’ “. . . lens of modern heteronormativity” leads them to erroneously equate homosocial moments in early American literature as homoerotic (5). I believe the lesbian continuum preserves the intention behind homosocial, that of relationships of primary intensity between those of the same sex, while allowing for the possibilities of homosexuality without demanding it because of the wide-ranging spectrum it allows.
MMMB opens with “An Essay on Friendship” by Hannah Griffitts, which I believe sets the tone for Moore’s commonplace book. Because the commonplace book is dominated by women, in terms of authorship and themes, I am placing this idealization of friendship in the category of same-sex friendship. The language used by Griffitts endorses a spiritual love and union between friends and invites a close reading. Friendship is encased within social joys, a physical and emotional experience:
the social Joys we find
in Hearts cemented & the friendly Mind,
The strong Affection & the watchful Care,
The feeling Pity & the ardent Pray’r (115).
Can hearts be “cemented” and not contain a sense of passion and intimacy? I find markers of such strong emotional and oftentimes physical (the merging into one) involvement a challenge to the model that demands rationality over “uncontrolled” passions in friendship; then again, perhaps it is friendship that controls and reigns in passion. Friendship functions to merge two people into one, “I pain the mutual Love, the melting Eye / And all the Beauties of the tender Tye.— / —Friendship, my Friend’s an Union of the Soul” (115). The trope of interchangeability, present in the history of friendship, appears here. Griffitts describes friendship as “the greatest Blessing we enjoy below,” “’Tis only rival’d by the bless’d above,” the “sacred Bond,” the “tender Joy,” and the “vital Flame” (115). A friend is a “bosom Friend” and friendship is “the chief & this alone the Base” (115). Life is made enjoyable and bearable by friendship—it is friendship, not sexual relationships or marriage that create the foundation of a good life. Although marriage should be between friends, as per Schweitzer’s research, I think Griffitts is illustrating that friendship need not be contained to marriage; it can exist outside of those bonds.
The friendship described in Griffitts’s poem is idealized, and the poem acts instructively, detailing not only the function of friendship but also how to cultivate this special bond. Friends should have
Similitude of Passions & of Mind,
Alike in Tempers, as alike in Love,
Mutual their Faith & Confidence improve
By simpathetic Tenderness are known
And feel each other’s Sorrows like their own. (115-6)
Again, the tropes of similarity and equality are located, although perhaps exceptions are made for those not necessarily of the same faith, such as Graeme Fergusson. Friendship is a “sacred trust,” and friends feel each other’s emotions as if they were their own, “Joy when they Joy, & when they sorrow, mourn” (116) and “Their Joys, their Dangers & their Hopes the same” (117). The bonds of friendship are intense, able to affect physical and emotional responses. The need for strong friendships is made explicit as Griffitts describes it as “dear Bonds of mutual Union ty’d” (116), mimicking the language of marriage. Griffitts also addresses the issue of heterosexual marriage, and its affects upon female friendship stating, “For if sincere, (when once the Knot is ty’d) / No little Pett can e’er the Bond divide” (116). This can also apply to the idea that once a friendship is “cemented,” no fight can break true friends apart. The truth of these unshakable bonds of friendship surface in MMMB when taking into consideration the biographical information available about the four main female contributors—despite their marital situations, the women created a connection strong enough that Moore allocated fifty percent of the commonplace book to Griffitts’ contributions, and preserved a significant amount of Wright’s poetry, with the intention of circulating her commonplace book amongst family, friends, and community (Blecki 69).
The responsibilities of a friend are repeatedly alluded to: to reveal each other’s virtue through love and with care, conceal and lessen failures. If separated, they feel a “painful Vacancy within” and are bereft of pleasure and joy. An invisible link, the “Union of the Soul” (117) connects the friends, and friends are referred to as “the dear half,” “the dear Partner,” “the firm unshaken Friend” (118) and “dear Part’ner of their Soul” (119). The link is desirable and sought after:
Ah! these sweet Bonds of Friendship stronger bind,
Engage th’ Affections & unite the Mind,
Beyond the types of Nature, they who’ve known,
Two friendly Souls made intimately one (118).
What can be more intimate than two people united in mind, perfectly in sync?
“To a Friend.—On some Misunderstanding” is authored by Wright and bears mentioning as it deals with a fight between friends. The length to which the narrator goes to make up with the friend after their fight is exaggerated but also demonstrates the importance of the relationship between the two friends:
—Thy strange unkindness carried much too high
Has made me fondly every Method try,
To work a Cure, & every Dress essay—
The haughty—suppliant—serious & the gay
But as I fondly every Method try’d,
It mock’d my Hopes, & unsuccessful dy’d; (141)
The narrator goes on to examine the role passion and folly plays in their lives, despite the reach for perfection and fore knowledge as prescribed by religion. Wright’s poem “On Friendship” looks to biblical inspiration for the ideal friendship, finding it with God’s creation the angels, whose “most exalted Attribute is Love”; they are “the benevolent, the perfect Friend” (143). Most intriguing is Wrights insistence that
As Souls no Sexes have, I claim a Right
To love my Friend with that refin’d Delight
With all that Warmth, with all that pleasing Fire
A most harmonious Being can inspire.— (144).
These lines are some of the strongest evidence for the female homosocial and lesbian continuum presence in MMMB, highlighting Wrights willingness to transgress against her cultural norms (“I claim a Right”). Does Wright claim souls are sexless in order to defend her intimate relationships with other women? Or is it a call for an emotional rather than physical union? Either way, she is challenging norms that defined friendship by her culture.
The view of a friends merging into one is repeated in Wright’s poem, “There thou, my Soul, thy secret self regard, / . . . / All doubled in a kind & faithful Friend / This one good Thing, O! may I long possess!” (144-5). The longing for the closeness that only friendship can provide is poignant and declarative. Indeed, life is not worth living without the comfort and benefits of friendship because “When of my Friends, or of their Love, depriv’d, / I’ll all resign—for long enough I’ve liv’d” (145). The interchangeability is illustrated by “the secret self” and strengthened by the similarity between the two friends, “all doubled.” These declarations of same-sex closeness serve as markers of the female homosocial and open the possibilities of the lesbian continuum. Many widowed spouses echo the same determination that Wright exclaims, that death is preferable to being left behind.
Griffitts’s poem “To Sophronia. In Answer to some lines she directed to be wrote on my fan. 1769” provides evidence of resistance to cultural norms regarding single women and the rebuffing of female advice that she marry. Caroline Winterer, in “The Female World of Classical Reading in Eighteenth-Century America” informs us that “[a] lonely old age as a spinster: this is what awaited the female classical pedant, if moralists were to be believed . . . Women did not necessarily take this lying down” (109). Winterer utilizes Griffitts’s poem, “To Sophronia” as her example of cultural defiance. Griffitts’s refusal to marry is not through failed romantic prospects, but rather a choice: “But to keep my dear Liberty, long as I can, / Is the Reason I chuse to live single” (173). While membership in the Society of Friends provides a buffer against colonial norms as Quakers did not demand marriage for women, Griffitts firmly defines her identity through her decision to remain a spinster because it offers “sweet Freedom” (174). The poem also offers an example of male-female friendship as she writes
The Men, (as a Friend) I prefer, I esteem,
And love them as well as I ought
But to fix all my Happiness, solely in Him
Was never my Wish or my Thought. (174)
The poem concludes with Griffitts urging the person, presumably a female friend, who offered the advice to go marry “as soon as you please” (174).
Graeme Fergusson’s journal excerpts provide material in support of the female homosocial in prose, though her journal does contain some poems. The journal includes entries Graeme Fergusson made while on a trip to England, and she directs some of her correspondence to specific people back in America—such as her friend Elizabeth Stedman (“Betsy”). Graeme Fergusson’s remarks on the connection she makes between friends and books reveals her familiarity with both, “I cannot help classing my Books like my Friends, they all have their respective Merits, but I am not equally acquainted with them” (202). The books are hers, she is wealthy enough to own books [3] and apparently she has an abundance of both books and friends.
One selection includes remarks directed to Betsy, giving the modern reader a glimpse of what female friendship entailed:
. . . this you & I have often talked over, as we have sat at the Door of Graeme Park, strolled on the Terrass or watched the Moon that friend to Contemplation, how happy have we been there, & how happy may we be again—o! my Friend, keep yr. Heart open to be pleased with Nature & yr. own mind; which from all I ever saw of it, will present no Page, on which is not wrote Innocence & Truth. (204-5)
Noticeable is the location where their friendship is safe and protected from masculine interference—the garden, located on her estates. Shields remarks, “[f]riendship prevailed only where dispassionate reason, religion, and a trusting sympathy reigned” (130) and in this case, it exists in a same-sex relationship, protected by the boundary of the garden. If you took this selection out of context, one could imagine it as a love letter from a woman to a man because of the language used by Graeme Ferguson. It is the blurring of boundaries by the use of such language (spiritually and sometimes physically romantic) that cements the author within the lesbian continuum and creates a female homosocial space. In another passage, Graeme Fergusson spells out what she wants from life, declaring “[a] Society of Friends whose Actions are guided by Affection, Chearfulness, Probity & Good-sense” (206). A husband is not mentioned nor marriage; instead it is friendship that takes the leading role. Graeme Fergusson is following in the tradition of breaking down top-down relations, finding comfort from friends rather than marriage bonds.
The garden appears again in Graeme Fergusson’s writing, this time in the poem
“The Invitation.” The location of the home and the garden is described as a place of “lasting Happiness” (259). She invites her friend Amanda (possibly Hetty Griffitts) to join her:
Thro’ lonely Walks, & shady Bowers,
We may delighted rove,
Where no Intruders can invade,
To ruffle gentle Love. (259)
Men are marked as the intruders with the clarification that the two women will “female Friendship share” (259) in seclusion, with only a little lap dog named Cupid for company. The two friends will enjoy “More lasting Happiness,” and “sweet Simplicity presides / And glads the virtuous Heart”—it is, as the poem concludes, “earthly Bliss refine[d]” (259). Although the language speaks in terms of emotional attachment, the physical isolation the two women will share points to a location on the lesbian continuum.
Griffitts provides another poem written in romantic language with “Primitive Friendship described.” The connection provided by friendship is given much consideration, as evidenced by the variety of descriptors designated by Griffitts: the “sacred Flame of Friendship” (266), “the soft Confidence of Friendship’s Flame,” and the “Union of Thought, & mingling Soul with Soul” (267). The reader is informed,
Where Friendship reigns, with undivided Sway
There lurks no Fear, by Freedom to offend,
The generous Sentiment can each convey
With all the easy Dignity of Friend. (267).
Friendship, not marriage, is the source material for the poem even though the language often imitates traditional marriage descriptors, such as union and ties. Furthermore, friendship acts as “the Bands of Liberty & Love” and offers the “tender Sympathy of Hearts” (267) to those involved. Opposed to the legal ramifications of marriage (feme covert), these bonds are embraced as bonds of intimacy and love between women. Griffitts genders friendship explicitly as “she” in “Steady Friendship. Jany. 1777.” For example, “Her Smiles revive the dreary Shades, / And bring her healing Balm;” (288). The power of this feminized friendship provides a type of anchor for those living in chaotic revolutionary America: “How e’er the gloomy Prospect pains, / How e’er the Storms arise, / Still steady Friendship well maintains / the sympathetic Tyes” (288). The function of friendship here echoes the language in “On Friendship” by Wright—life is precious on Earth because of friendship’s powerful influence.
Through a selective reading of verse and prose MMMB entries that exhibit themes of friendship, specifically same-sex friendship, and placing these examples on the lesbian continuum within a homosocial space opens up new avenues of scholarship in early American literature. By defining the homosocial space through the lesbian continuum, the temptation to equate homosocial with homosexuality is avoided; instead, a wide range of possibilities are left open, allowing for a more nuanced and feminist reading. As explored in this essay, the four main contributors of MMMB found strategies of defiance to withstand and usurp male control over their reading habits, writing practices, and same-sex friendships while leaving behind a legacy in the most intimate of formats, Moore’s handwritten commonplace book.
Footnotes:
[1]: From OED: “A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.” Commonplace (n) is defined as “a striking or notable passage, noted, for reference or use, in a book of commonplaces or COMMONPLACE-BOOK n” (OED).
[2]: “. . . Quaker prohibition against marrying non-Quakers was so strong that to marry kin was an obvious solution, especially if potential marriage partners were limited by the requirements of social and economic status as well as by religion” (Wulf 16).
[3]: Hayes’s example from “Reading Women,” “[i]t is a poignant comment on the legal status of early American women to read that Carter specifically had to will his wife ‘her own books’” (6) reveals the remarkableness that Graeme Fergusson “owned” her books, in spite of her legal status of a married woman.
Works Cited:
Blecki, Catherine L., and Karin A. Wulf, eds. Milcah Martha Moore's Book: a Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. Print.
Blecki, Catherine La Courreye. “Reading Moore’s Book: Manuscripts vs. Print Culture and the Development of Early American Literature.” Milcah Martha Moore's Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America. Ed. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. 59-106. Print.
"commonplace, n. and adj." OED Online. November 2010. Oxford University Press. 4 December 2010. Web.
"common place-book, n." OED Online. November 2010. Oxford University Press. 4 December 2010. Web.
Hayes, Kevin J. A Colonial Woman's Bookshelf. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1996. Print.
"Homosocial." The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Joseph W. Childers and Gary Hentzi. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 138-39. Print.
Rich, Adrienne. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Signs 5.4 (1980): 631-60. JSTOR. Web. 01 Sept. 2010.
Schweitzer, Ivy. Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 2006. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Print.
Shields, David S. Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Print.
Stabile, Susan M. Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America. NY: Cornell UP, 2004. Print.
Winterer, Caroline. “The Female World of Classical Reading in Eighteenth-Century America.” Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500—1800. Ed. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2008. 105-23. Print.
Wulf, Karin A. "Milcah Martha Moore's Book: Documenting Culture and Connection in the Revolutionary Era." Milcah Martha Moore's Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America. Ed. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. 1-57. Print.
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