Rough Draft

The assignment from Dr. Logan:

Post completed draft to your blog 11/23/10, 11:59 p.m. and to your manuscript circle.

Send a copy to me as a Word doc.

Using Manuscript Circles Discussion Topic in Webcourses, complete Reader’s Reports by; send copy of Reader’s Reports to individual authors by 11/30/10.

[Submitted 23 November 2010]

Bonds of Intimacy: 

The Female Homosocial and Lesbian Continuum in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book

The women of Milcah Martha Moore’s Book are old, middle aged, young, married, single, abandoned by their husbands, kicked out of their church for their marriage, have children, are childless, have suffered the death of loved ones, participate in different sects of Christianity, and represent varied economic backgrounds.  Despite these cultural, social and economic differences, preserved in Moore’s handwritten commonplace book are bonds of female friendship in the form of poetry and prose, authored by women for women.

The 1997 modern critical edition of Milcah Martha Moore’s Book makes accessible previously ignored women’s writing in early American literature through Moore’s commonplace book, a rare example of the non-traditional format.  Catherine Blecki and Karin Wulf, the editors, provide invaluable scholarship regarding the social, manuscript, and print culture of revolutionary Philadelphia and emphasize the links of friendship connecting the contributing authors and editor of the text.  This essay extends Blecki 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.

I argue that Moore’s commonplace book both 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.  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 and history of the book from Kevin J. Hayes, I illustrate the relationship between the strategies of defiance and non-compliance in regards to the sexuality, readership, authorship, and friendship in MMMB.





Reading practices
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.  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” (Hayes 2-3).  
 
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 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 friends in a trans-Atlantic world.  In addition to her surviving commonplace book, in 1787 Moore published Miscellanies, Moral and Instructive, for use in schools.  Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s library had 400 volumes, according to court records, 130 of which were lent to her by her gentlemen friends.  Hayes speculates, “The 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” (Hayes 22).  Further proof is found by Hayes in the surviving correspondence of Graeme Fergusson, most importantly that “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.    
 
The commonplace book, as a genre, was originally wholly in the domain of men, specifically as a tool for educating school boys.  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.  (Stabile 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” (Stabile 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” (Stabile 110). 


Female Homosocial and Lesbian Continuum
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 Sedgwick claims female homosocial ties “are not so emphatically opposed to homosexual ties between women.  Lesbian relations, in her view, are seen in our society as more continuous with the sanctioned relations between mother and daughters, between female friends and coworkers” (The Columbia Dictionary 138-9).  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.  Although Rich argues that these ties are set against “resistance to heterosexuality and male domination” (The Columbia Dictionary 167), to which I disagree.  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 be abandoned by 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.  Moore remained childless, and scholars Blecki and Wulf suspect the high levels of intermarriage amongst 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.  She secretly married Henry Hugh Fergusson, who supported the Tory 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.  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.


FF poems in MMMB
MMMB opens with “An Essay on Friendship” by Hannah Griffitts, which I believe sets the tone for the commonplace book.  Because the commonplace book is dominated by women, in terms of authorship and themes, I am placing this friendship in the category of female 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” (MMMB 115).  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” (MMMB 115).  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” (MMMB 115).  A friend is a “bosom Friend” and friendship is “the chief & this alone the Base” (MMMB 115).


The friendship described in this 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.  (MMMB 115-6)

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” (MMMB 116) and “Their Joys, their Dangers & their Hopes the same” (MMMB 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” (MMMB 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” (MMMB 116).  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 Wright’s poetry.


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” (MMMB 117) connects the friends, and friends are referred to as “the dear half,” “the dear Partner,” “the firm unshaken Friend” (MMMB 118) and “dear Part’ner of their Soul” (MMMB 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” (MMMB 118).


“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; (MMMB 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, “most exalted Attribute is Love” are “the benevolent, the perfect Friend” (MMMB 143).  Most intriguing is Wrights instance 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”).  


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!” (MMMB 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” (MMMB 145).

Griffitt’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.  Her 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” (MMMB 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” (MMMB 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. (MMMB 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” (MMMB 174).

Graeme Fergusson’s journal excerpts provide material in support of the female homosocial in prose, rather than verse as the previous examples.  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” (MMMB 202).  The books are hers, she is wealthy enough to own books 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. (MMMB 204-5)

Noticeable is the location where their friendship is safe and protected from masculine interference – the garden, located on her estates.  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, “A Society of Friends whose Actions are guided by Affection, Chearfulness, Probity & Good-sense” (MMMB 206).  A husband is not mentioned nor marriage; instead it is friendship that takes the leading role.


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.  (MMMB 259)

Men are marked as the intruders with the clarification that the two women will “female Friendship share” (MMMB 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]” (MMMB 259). 


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” (MMMB 266), “the soft Confidence of Friendship’s Flame,” and the “Union of Thought, & mingling Soul with Soul” (MMMB 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.  (MMMB 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” (MMMB 267) to those involved.  Griffitts genders friendship explicitly as “she” in “Steady Friendship. Jany. 1777.”  For example, “Her Smiles revive the dreary Shades, / And bring her healing Balm;” (MMMB 288).  The power of this feminized friendship provides a type of anchor for those living in chaotic colonial America: “How e’er the gloomy Prospect pains, / How e’er the Storms arise, / Still steady Friendship well maintains / the sympathetic Tyes” (MMMB 288).


Conclusion
The female homosocial and colonial heterosexual norms can co-exist and are not mutually exclusive, as evidenced by this essay.  While their cultural standards tried to control these women’s behavior, they found strategies of defiance to withstand and usurp such control.  Female friendship is one such strategy, and locating these examples of the female homosocial and lesbian continuum within early American literature requires understanding of said strategies.  



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.

Brayman, Hackel H, and Catherine E. Kelly.  Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2008.  Print. 

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.

"Lesbian Continuum." The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Joseph W. Childers and Gary Hentzi. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 167-168. 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.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll.  "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America."  Signs 1.1 (1975): 1-29.  JSTOR.  Web.  09 Sept. 2010.

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