Conference Presentation

[See the Conference Program for reference.]


Panel 1: Unruly women and gendered formations of national identity


I acted in the role of a respondent, and provided two pre-written questions, and one spontaneous question.  Note, this does not mean my questions were necessarily posed and answered, merely that I came prepared as per the conference regulations.


Q1: How effective would you consider your novel to its contemporary readers based on the author’s “goals.”  By goals, I mean it seems that all three novels contain moral or instructive purpose, either explicitly mentioned in their preface/introduction or within the story itself.


Q2: The theme of education, albeit in various forms, seems to run throughout all three of your texts.  In Female Quixotism, it is the education of young girls, in “Rosenglory” it is the education of the public about the consequences of seduction, and in Rachel Dyer, it is the education of the public about the danger of linking external and internal appearances and virtue.  Do you think these novels are working on a public/private or personal/national level?


Spontaneous Q:  [I will update this after our conference.]
Panel 2: Unruly women, gender boundaries, and crossing


I acted in the role of presenter, alongside Blake and Mark.


Thesis: Preserved in Moore’s handwritten commonplace book are bonds of female friendship in the form of verse and prose, authored by women for women.  The book itself, by virtue of its genre, is a transgressive object – colonial women in the eighteenth century adapted and repurposed the commonplace book for their own uses, using it to circulate knowledge amongst themselves. These bonds of intimacy, contained within a newly feminized genre and expressed in a language of affection, create a female homosocial space in which the lesbian continuum functions as a measuring rubric.  


Intervention in current scholarship: I think my use of the lesbian continuum, as a rubric for the female homosocial space, is what differentiates my approach from others’ research on the commonplace book in our field.  The lesbian continuum opens up a world of possibilities, which are now freed from the constricting and unproductive binary of hetero/homosexuality.  The focus is now on female-female relationships instead of through a filter of men. 


Example from paper:
For my example, I want to share with you all some lines from the opening entry in Moore’s commonplace book, Hannah Griffitts’s “An Essay on Friendship,” a poem.


The poem, we are told, is written because “The Friend requires, & friendship does demand, / At least th’ attempt from my inferior Hand.”  


While I describe the social Joys we find
In Hearts cemented & the friendly Mind,
The strong Affection & the watchful Care,
The feeling Pity & the ardent Pray’r.
I paint the mutual Love, the melting Eye
And all the Beauties of the tender Tye.—
—Friendship, my Friend’s an Union of the Soul
Expands its Flames & spread’s throughout the whole.
The greatest Blessing we enjoy below,
From this pure Stream untainted Pleasures flow,
So fix’d this Friendship & so firm its Love,
‘Tis only rival’d by the bless’d above,


Notice the language of intimacy present in the poem – hearts cemented, strong affection, feeling pity, mutual love, and tender tie.  We are told friendship is a union of the soul and has spreading influence, described as flames.  Friendship is the greatest blessing while alive on Earth, and is a pure stream of untainted pleasure; its only rival is Heaven itself.  This language continues throughout the rest of this poem, and appears in more friendship entries by Hannah Griffitts, Susanna Wright, and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson.  Their vision of friendship is one of love, tenderness, devotion, strength, commitment, and support, and it is beautiful, touching, and lovely.  It was truly my pleasure to explore the female homosocial space these women created, and to examine the ways in which the lesbian continuum existed in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book.
Panel 3: Theorizing unruly women: performance and masquerade


I acted in the role of panel chair, but thought it best to be prepared with “emergency” questions, just in case.  Also, I couldn’t help myself, I really enjoyed hunting down connections between the three papers.


Q1:  All three of your texts deal with prisons or jails, in one shape or another.  Zach’s texts feature actual jail cells, whereas Lesley’s and Lindsay’s texts portray the Catholic convent as a prison.  Do you think the levels of surveillance are equal throughout, or would you argue that one is worse than another?


Q2: Mad Jane Ray offers a physical, bodily resistance in addition to verbal resistance.  Rachel Wall provides verbal and religious resistance, and Rebecca Reed offers a literary resistance (she won’t keep her mouth shut; publishes her story + the appendix as “proof”).  Who would you vote for as the most unruly character, if you had to pick?

The Plan

Like the Cylons, I too have a plan.  But mine involves a lot less genocide.  And by a lot less, I mean none.  It’s currently 3:30 am, let’s move on so I can get some sleep, shall we?


Rough Draft Fixes*:


*These are fixes I came up with before our manuscript circle on November 30, 2010, when I realized my rough draft was rougher than I would have liked.  Combined with the constructive criticism I received from Zach and Blake, I think I’ll be in good shape to fix my paper for Tuesday, December 7, 2010.

• Susan Stabile relocates and categorizes the 18th century American commonplace book by women as a distinctly feminized genre.  Moore is participating in a subversive tactic of adaptation for feminine purposes – genealogical motivation (reword?) fits in with the preservation of Wrights, Griffitts, and Graeme Ferugsson’s works.  Find quote from Blecki/Wulf that she’s preserving the kinship and friendship networks of Quaker Philadelphia, and use the bonds of intimacy quote too.

• Ivy Schweitzer provides the context of the 18th century American view of classical friendship.  She claims too often critics/scholars equate homosocial with homosexuality – this is why I want to use the lesbian continuum, allows for a broad spectrum without strict binary of hetero/homosexual.

• Kevin J. Hayes provides the context of gender norms and standards of colonial woman’s reading habits, as well as exceptions to these rules.  Most notable is how many women flat out went against convention – more than I expected.

• Eve Sedgwick defines homosocial and female homosocial.  Adrienne Rich defines compulsory heterosexuality and the lesbian continuum.  I disagree that the lesbian continuum and female homosocial must be defined against heterosexuality.

• Evidence from MMMB: biographical, and textual.  The entries provide: language of intimacy (spiritual and sometimes physical closeness – the garden), language of friendship.  Female authorship dominates MMMB – Griffitts provides 50% of the entries and “An Essay on Friendship” opens the text, despite interrupting the well-ordered sections (Wright’s poems follow the first entry).

• Do I use Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s essay or no?  Do I see female rituals – do the memorial poetry/prose entries count as a female ritual?

• Rework thesis – I don’t think it’s very clear.  Use above summaries to keep my goal front and center: bonds of intimacy = female homosocial -> lesbian continuum.  More clearly articulated: a female homosocial space is carved out by 1. genre (Stabile) and 2. language of intimacy in the entries (by women, for women).  Use of lesbian continuum leaves open the possibility of homosexuality without demanding it.

• Look up MLA rules for: poetry in-text citation and for block quotes (both prose and poetry).

• Flesh out conclusion (do after rest of paper is fixed).

• Update Works Cited to reflect only cited sources.  Erase out placeholders from rough draft (note: Smith-Rosenberg, Schweitzer, Rich were listed in the rough draft as reminders to myself to pull quotes for use in the final draft).

Manuscript Evaluation Form

The assignment from Dr. Logan:


Dear LIT 6216 Scholars,

Thank you for agreeing to serve as manuscript reviewers for the upcoming conference “Early American Novel and the Nation.”  I attach a Reviewer Response Form, which I ask that you use as you review the manuscripts.  I request that you review at least two manuscripts.  In past conferences, writers have praised this conference for the detailed reviewers’ comments that have assisted them with their research and composing processes.  Please complete your reading of the manuscripts and return the sheets to the individual writers by 11/30/10.

Please fill out one Reviewer Response Form for at least two people, and make sure to post your own essay at the common area in discussions (under “Research Proposals and Drafts”).  (As well, please post these at your blogs.)  I am grateful for the spirit of intellectual community which pervades our classroom, and I hope that you will approach this process in that spirit.  


Best, Lisa Logan

LIT 6216:  Unruly Women in Early American Literature

Reviewer Evaluation Form

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 via email.

Conference format:  Papers for this conference will be circulated beforehand and discussed (rather than read) at the conference meeting.  Papers should be 8-10 pp. double-spaced using 12-pt. font.  (excluding bibliography/Works Cited). 

[Submitted 30 November 2010]


Instead of filling out the manuscript evaluation form via email, the class as a whole agreed to bring hard copies to our class on November 30, 2010 and read each other’s papers in person.  We were each responsible for reading two people’s papers – ideally someone with whom we shared a panel presentation, and the other selection was up to us.  It was optional whether or not as a reader you filled out the manuscript evaluation form or simply wrote your notes on the hard copy.


I read and evaluated the rough drafts by Blake, Lindsay, and Zach ahead of time so I wouldn’t have to deal with my own project.  In other words, I happily engaged in strategies of procrastination.  In class, I read Stephen’s paper, and I took home Jen’s paper and returned it to her on Thursday (the 2nd).  I greatly enjoyed reading the papers that I had time for, and I’m looking forward to everyone’s presentation during our mock conference.


My readers were Zach and Blake and I want to thank them for their thoughtful and helpful comments and constructive criticism.  An outside perspective is extremely helpful, especially when I’ve been involved with my text for such a long period of time that I forgot not everyone would know what a commonplace book *is* (Blake caught that issue).


I’m including the template of the manuscript evaluation form below, and then I’ll retype the notes from Zach and Blake.  (Blake’s notes are briefer because we ran out of time during class.)


My rough draft is here.

Conference Program

LIT 6216:  Issues in Literary Study (Unruly Women in Early American Literature) Conference Program

1. Unruly women and gendered formations of national identity


Stephen Collins, Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism: Early American Education and the Quixotic

Spencer Tricker, ‘Cruel Ignominious Death:’ Martyrdom of the Marginalized in John Neal’s Rachel Dyer

Jennifer Brunk, “Rosenglory”: Infantilism and Free Agency in the Case of Amelia Norman

Panel Chair:  Lindsay Anderson
Respondents:  Zachary Hyde, Jay Jay Stroup, Blake Vives


2. Unruly women, gender boundaries, and crossing


Blake Vives, Discovering Deborah Sampson: Gallantress of Early American Feminine Masculinity

Mark Hartley, Codifying Cross-dressing for Patriotism in The Female Marine

Jay Jay Stroup, Bonds of Intimacy: The Female Homosocial and Lesbian Continuum in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book

Panel Chair: Stephen Collins
Respondents: Spencer Tricker, Lindsay Anderson, Lesley Koon


3. Theorizing unruly women: performance and masquerade


Zachary Hyde, Performance, Resistance, and the Panoptic in Early American Execution Events

Lindsay Anderson, Rebecca Reed’s Escape: A Tale of Manipulation and Masquerade

Lesley Koon, Why Are These Nuns Laughing?:  Mad Jane Ray and the Deployment of Carnival Laughter in Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures

Panel Chair:  Jay Jay Stroup
Respondents: Mark Hartley, Jennifer Brunk, Stephen Collins, Blake Vives

Feminine American Myth-Making

During our class discussion on The Female American (10/12/10), Dr. Logan asked us if American myth-making can ever be independent of colonization, decimation, and eradication.  My answer was an emphatic “no.”  Despite the blood-free colonization that Unca Eliza Winkfield enacts upon the natives of the island, she still decimates their religious way of life, destroying their sun idol and converting them to Christianity.  Even the idealized female utopia portrayed in The Female American involves colonization, decimation, and eradication.  

What does occur, in American literature, is the pretense of emptiness, an imaginary lack of native people already occupying the Americas.  This, of course, is one of the strategies of American myth-making – pretend that the land was un-occupied when in reality it was occupied by a large amount of Native peoples.  Reality (historical fact) vs. fantasy (what authors wrote) in American literature is incredibly fascinating and requires careful reading to know when you’re being duped by the author.  Another strategy is religious justification.  Edward J. Gallagher has a digital archive dedicated to the literature of justification, aptly titled The Literature of Justification.

Imagine my surprise when I found an example of (feminine) American myth-making by Hannah Griffitts in MMMB, signed with her pen name Fidelia.  And by feminine, I mean written by a woman.  The entry is “The Review of past & present Times in Pennsylvania.  June 1776,” MMMB # 91 (not available in the GoogleBooks preview).  

Rather than retype the entire entry, I’m going to post small sections that I belief best represent American myth-making.

Housekeeping

Despite not having enough free time to post, I have updated and fussed with the site these past two weeks.  Because some of these changes are small, or only noticeable to me, I’m going to list the “behind the scenes” work that has occupied my time.

Blog Blurb:
I met with Dr. Logan last week to talk about my paper proposal and I brought up my uneasiness of using Queer Theory when I still knew next to nothing about it other than the concepts of the female homosocial and lesbian continuum.  That’s when Dr. Logan reminded me that Adrienne Rich is not a Queer theorist but a feminist theorist, and she suggested that I use feminist theory informed by these two concepts.  I can’t tell you how relieved I felt and happy that I was indeed on the right track for my paper.  To reflect this refocus, I’ve updated my blog blurb.    


Old: 
This blog is part of my current research project for Dr. Lisa Logan's "Issues in Literary Study: Unruly Women in Early American Literature" course at the University of Central Florida, Fall 2010 semester. Research will focus on Milcah Martha Moore's Book, an unpublished commonplace book, through the lens of Queer Theory, specifically the ideas of the female homosocial and lesbian continuum.


New:
This blog is part of my current research project for Dr. Lisa Logan's "Issues in Literary Study: Unruly Women in Early American Literature" course at the University of Central Florida, Fall 2010 semester.  Research will focus on Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, an unpublished commonplace book, through the lens of Feminist Theory informed by the female homosocial and lesbian continuum. 

Inside Joke

“It’s a POLITICAL text!” – Dr. Logan

[click for larger image]

Thank you to Elizabeth, Stephen’s wife, and Elizabeth’s sister, for making such a delicious cake for our class.  And no, you can never have too much frosting!

You can read about The Coquette; or, the History of Eliza Wharton by Hannah Webster Foster on Wikipedia, and download the text for free on Project Gutenberg.

Re-Imagination and Disney Princesses

[This post is dedicated to my sister Erin, the most Disney Princess girl I’ve ever known. She’s all about Belle.]


Dr. Logan structured our course so that each of the ten students presents a text to the rest of the class in a 30-45 minute presentation; we are also responsible for the creation of a handout to guide and focus our discussion of the selected text.  Last night’s class was on The Female American, attributed to Unca Eliza Winkfield.  Spencer was our presenter, and on the handout, he included an art deco image of Pocahontas.  In The Female American, Unca Eliza’s Native American mother is a Pocahontas figure, saving her future husband from death at the hands of her tribe, of which her father is king.  Unca Eliza, a bi-racial character, frequently references her skill with a bow and arrow, which makes the selected image particularly suitable.

 [click for a larger view]

Part of our assignment included browsing through the images in Edward J. Gallagher’s Pocahontas Images gallery to acquaint ourselves with the ways in which the persona and image of Pocahontas has been appropriated by cultures throughout time.  There is an astounding amount of images available on the site, and apparently, Pocahontas can, with the stroke of an artist’s paintbrush or pen, transform from a Native American woman into a hybrid into a white woman.


So, during our class discussion (or was it last week’s discussion?  Oh old age, you are wrecking havoc on my memory), the subject of the Disney princesses came up, and Dr. Logan asked us, “Do any of them end their story not married?”  As we sat there thinking, we realized – no, all of the princesses, except Pocahontas, end up married.  However, even Pocahontas cannot escape the fate of a Disney tale, and ends up married in the sequel, Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World (thanks to Jen for saving the day with this trivia tidbit).  

The Homosocial Network

If, as Dr. Logan’s Early American Women’s Words undergraduate class postulates, Facebook is a modern version of the commonplace book, then the movie The Social Network is worth taking a closer look.  I have not seen the movie, and have very little desire to do so, but after reading through some of these movie reviews, I might have to see it – in the name of research, of course.


The first review that caught my eye was on Slate (I am addicted to Dear Prudence).  I glanced through it and a reference to another article, “The (Homo)Social Network” is what snagged my attention.  The homosocial is on my mind almost twenty four seven thanks to this project, so there was no way I could let this opportunity for a modern connection slide past me.


So, I gathered a list of articles reviewing The Social Network, which wasn’t too hard because some of the reviews refer to other reviews.  This list is by no means exhaustive, obviously, but it heartens me to see reviewers grappling with the role of women within the movie, and its social consequences.  Enjoy.

• From Bitch Magazine: "Tube Tied: Stephen Colbert Asks About Women, and Maybe that's All I Need" by Michelle Dean

• From Jezebel: "The Social Network, Where Women Never Have Ideas" by Irin Carmon

• From Women and Hollywood: "Stephen Colbert Asks Aaron Sorkin About the Ladies in The Social Network" by Melissa Silverstein

• From IFC: "The (Homo)Social Network: "The Social Network" doesn't have a problem with women -- its characters do." by Alison Willmore

• From Slate: "Is the Facebook Movie Sexist?" by Dana Stevens

• From Salon: "Sorkin explains "Social Network" sexism" by Tracy Clar-Flory and "Female programmers on "The Social Network."  How accurate is the Facebook movie's depiction of women as trophies in the world of Web 2.0? We asked the experts." by Tracy Clark-Flory

• From The Daily Beast via Business Insider: "Groupies, Sexed-Up Asians, Vengeful Sluts, And Feminist Killjoys – Meet The Women Of The Social Network" by Rebecca Davis O'Brien

• [Edited on 19 October 2010 to add another link] From Tenured Radical, The 2.0 Edition: "Straight People, Listen!  The Pervasiveness of Cruelty in Mass Culture" by Tenured Radical

Preliminary Bibliography

The assignment from Dr. Logan:  


Using the MLA International Bibliography and America: History and Life databases at the UCF Library, develop a preliminary bibliography of secondary scholarly sources in the discipline of literature (with contextual sources from historians).  Use MLA documentation style.  Include keywords and searches used to develop this bibliography.  Consult a reference librarian if you encounter difficulties. 

[Submitted: 24 September 2010]

I have included a lot of sources which will (probably) end up being discarded during a closer look at each journal article and/or book.  However, I wanted to include them all because, one, I spent a lot of time looking them up, and two, it provides with me a wide range of possibilities for my project.  This preliminary bibliography will serve as a valuable resource for my project, and while I know I’ll end up spending more time on research, this guide should help me narrow and focus my search.

There were no results for female homosocial, and none applicable to my topic for homosocial in MLA, which is unsurprising considering its absence in the Library of Congress Subject Headings book.

Using MMMB in MLA for various options yielded just the modern edition.  Using MMMB as keyword term in America: History & Life yielded two already recorded book reviews of the modern edition, and one article about her published Miscellanies, Moral and Instructive text.

I included book reviews because I want to know how the book/article was received by the scholarly audience, or to quote Dr. Anna Jones, to see if they “bought it.”  I also included dissertations because of their works cited, which could potentially yield a lot of valuable sources.  I especially want to track down Susan Stabile’s dissertation, not just the abstract, which will require an ILL because the full text is not available via ProQuest.  When I included sources listed in the books I have already checked out of the UCF library, I only looked in the introductions due to time constraints.  Sometimes a source would appear in multiple locations (a book’s introduction, MLA and America: History & Life); I merely recorded it the first time I encountered it rather than list unnecessary duplications.

The categories of my preliminary bibliography at a quick glance:

• Recommendations from: Dr. Logan, and Jessica Workman.
• Found on my own
• From my previous research on The Factory Girl

• From Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America, A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf, Literature After Feminism, The Madwoman in the Attic, Memory’s Daughters, and Reading Women.

• Using of Marty Beth Norton as author in MLA
• Using Adrienne Rich as the subject term in MLA
• Using Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in America: History & Life
• Using Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in MLA
• Using Susan Stabile as author in MLA
• Using Laurel Thatcher Ulrich as the author in WorldCat

• Using commonplace book in America: History & Life
• Using commonplace book as subject (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using Delaware River Valley (N.Y.-Del. & N.J.) (1700-1799) in America: History & Life
• Using female friendship in literature (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using female-female relations (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using lesbianism in literature (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using literature and revolutions, (subject literature: American) (1700-1799): in MLA
• Using Manuscripts, American in America: History & Life
• Using Manuscripts, American (1700-1799) as subject in MLA
• Using Manuscript studies, American (1700-1799) as subject in MLA
• Using Quaker women (1700-1799) in America: History & Life
• Using Quaker women (1700-1799) in MLA

Welcome

Welcome to my research blog, Bonds of Intimacy.  This is my second experience using Blogger to record and make public the process of a semester long research project that culminates in a conference paper and presentation.  My first experience is visible here, at my blog Conduct Yourself.  Feel free to explore my previous work, both Conduct Yourself and the wiki-styled page I created with three other classmates, Geography of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  See my bio for more details about the classes and professors. 

Because this project encourages us to record the process, this blog will not be perfect.  The components of the research project posted will be the copies I submitted to Dr. Logan for a grade – not corrected copies.  Sometimes I will be right, but more often (probably) I will be wrong.  But that’s okay.  What is important is that I learn with each assignment, expanding my base of knowledge.  It will be messy, even chaotic at times.  You will learn how nerdy I am, that my social life (what little there is to begin with) will take a backseat to this project because I get severe tunnel vision, and that if I forget to bring a sweatshirt to the fourth floor of the UCF Library, I will complain about the cold and how it makes my nose drip.  In short, the life of an English literature graduate student is decidedly unsexy.  But that’s okay too.

This blog, by its very nature, will be a strange, and perhaps uneasy, combination of academic product and personal reflections.  I am in a way, taking my cue from Anne G. Myles, whose article "From Monster to Martyr: Re-Presenting Mary Dyer" we read for our second class.  In her article, she states, “My approach to, and need for, this material is obviously informed by the fact that I encounter it as both a Quaker and lesbian reader looking for a usable past; however, these seem to me powerful, challenging dimensions in any context” (18).  The material she references is the relationship between Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, and it is Myles’s hope that it can be categorized as a “’lesbian’ scene in seventeenth-century America” (18) – as based on the idea of the lesbian continuum¹.  

It is this article, and specifically the class discussion we had concerning this claim of a lesbian scene, that birthed (pun intended) my thesis: that the commonplace book Milcah Martha Moore created is a physical representation of her love for her friends, and their love for her.  That these women belong somewhere on the lesbian continuum, I am sure.  I am risking my entire research project on this claim because in a way, despite being neither a Quaker nor a lesbian such as Myles, I too am looking for a usable past.  I want to believe that despite the political, social, economical, religious, and legal restrictions women faced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, they could in fact, rely on each other.  It is important to me to believe they could turn to each other for love (sexual or non-sexual), comfort, support, affection, advice, and friendship to form intimate bonds, both in spite of and despite the men involved in their lives.     

Feel free to explore my blog, and especially feel free to comment on its design and content (what little there is so far).  I hope my enthusiasm for this project is contagious, and that you, my readers, stick around until the conclusion.

¹The lesbian continuum, as Dr. Logan explained in class, is like a sliding scale.  On the one end, you have women who are friends with women, and at the other, women who have sex with other women.  I must admit that is the extent of my knowledge on this theory, so of course, I have more research to do.



Works Cited:
Myles, Anne G.  “From Monster to Martyr.”  Early American Literature 36.1 (2001):  1-30. JSTOR.  Web. 24 August 2010.