Coopering Lesson, c. 1855

In coopering, the device a cooper uses to hold the stave
is called a shaving horse, or mare.

There’s a rhythm to it,
as Father’s bare hands, arms,
draw the hollowing knife along each
riven stave, legs braced against the
mare’s length, cedar falling in commas
from his aproned waist. It’s the scooping
out that forms each stave’s curve,   twenty
or more hollowed in equal arcs before heat,
hoops, windlass, rope bind them in round
certainty—the way parentheses hold in all
we don’t say directly. Next, Father sets
the cask ablaze,  char sealing its pores,
flames’ height the clock by which he
gauges time, the line between
destruction and enough.

 

Commencement

Poem constructed from the words of Henry M. Pierce’s commencement address
to Grace’s class, the first graduating class of Rutgers Female College, 1867.

 

Of late, the public mind is agitated by the question
of woman’s true position and her proper education.

Equal, I would claim is woman’s place beside of man. I am persuaded
the time is near when we shall marvel this was ever seriously debated.

Along with reason, my opinion rests in Christ’s own Holy view.
How else, in his ideal of marriage, could one truly fuse from two?

It follows that in woman’s preparation for this station,
her schooling should be equal to man’s liberal education.

Graduates, yield not to mean spirits who protest each notch
of woman’s rise is cut from man’s God-given lot.

Civilization’s advance hereafter, or its like decline,
depends on the place each nation gives to womankind.

 

Stereocard, c. 1893

In the 1870’s, Grace moved to Richmond with her mother;
her sister Minnie remained in New York City.

Dear Minnie,

          Thank you for the stereocard, dear sister. Wherever
did you find it? The House of Mansions gone a decade, yet
here, in double, those lancet windows (now rubble) where
once I peered into the heavens. How fast Rutgers outgrew
what seemed enough: crenellated towers, labyrinthine halls.
Moving the college, telescope and all. Do you remember
how, in summer, we’d spread a blanket on grass already
misted with night’s kiss, and I’d read you the stars?
Gazelle is what we saw in Ursa Major, galloping
across the sky (I still do). Why Great Bear?
This card truly transports me to your side.

Still, names recorded are what persist, lines drawn
what we insist on or resist. Take a ship’s register.
At each port, my bare fingers trigger the same label
under “calling”: spinster. As if men study a stereocard
in which a twin image of my spirit is split: half
with laughter, good works, this sisterhood absent
from their senses, pen declaring me only without.

I want to reply, but silence is the only kindness
(can you hear Mother too?). Instead, I recast spinster
to describe how I spin filaments of students’ dreams,
talents, and study into thread, perhaps for blankets
like the one under our heads when we were girls.

          At least as Mrs. Young, you’re spared this word,
if not its measure. I recall the line in Mother’s obituary
that halted my tears: Only one of her daughters
is married—Joanna and I as marks against her reckoning.

                                                                      Love,
                                                                      Grace

                                                                      P.S. I should
amend what I said earlier. There is another word
they record sometimes:            none.

 

Böhme’s Theory, c. 1905

Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) was a Christian theologian and mystic.

Dear Minnie,

          You mentioned Böhme in your letter, his theory that
God has pressed Himself into the world for us to discover. What if
He is pressed in human invention too? Clothing, buildings, machines.
What if, along with dahlias and the brush of sunrise on the Hudson,
He’s in these things? Then perhaps it’s in these signals combined
that God sends His most urgent messages. Consider those white flags
draped, motionless, on tenement doors, markers hung for children
smothered by summer’s heat—while outside, wind licked and licked
at sheets strung between alleys, nudging corners up like tongues.

          This isn’t the reply you expected.
It’s just, of late, I’ve noticed how much around us is designed
to look like something it is not: bloomers like skirts,
chemisette as blouse.      Nature deceives as well. Near
Honolulu, the ocean kaleidoscopes with rose,
                                                                                                    emerald,
                                                                                gold,
before settling back to blue.
                                                            Yet, it isn’t the sea changing,
                                                            but reflections of corals below.
What should we glean from this?
                                                           The poem about Death stopping—
you know the one. I rode in such a carriage with loneliness.
Still, I hope for love, companionship. Is this deceit?

          At Kenilworth, on our last trip with Uncle Lewis, I plucked holly
from its beautiful ruin and tucked it in my journal. It clings
to green. A pressing? But I worry I overlook more than I see.
Last week, on our block, I discovered steps
                                                                      sunk into a bank. They led
                                 to a lilac pendant with lavender, house fallen
(or taken) down long ago. How many stairways do we pass
that could lead to our flourishing?        Their fragrance lingers
in these halls, that without Mother or Uncle, lengthen. Another deceit.
          I miss you, dear sister.

 

How It Was

Grace Arents died on June 20, 1926. Announcements lauded her philanthropy, some noting surviving relatives. Although Grace left life-rights at Bloemendaal to Mary Garland Smith, her name was not mentioned.
This poem is in Mary Garland’s voice.

How the altar candle wouldn’t catch,
struggling to burn as I struggled for breath.

How people embraced your sister, nephews,
tears passing from cheeks to shoulder sleeves.

How the eulogy, brief as you’d requested,
bid students to mind their studies, parents, prayers.

How they wept into folded hands as I pictured you
kneeling to console each child—arms open, gaze warm.

How when my vision cleared, there was only emptiness
in the pew beside me—the hymns sung, the flame gone.

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Walking with Grace: A Documentary Poetry Journey

My journey to learn about Grace Evelyn Arents (1848-1926) began when I moved into a home within walking distance of her last residence, Bloemendaal, now part of a botanical garden named after her uncle Lewis Ginter.

 

I quickly learned how Grace’s generosity and tenacity transformed the Oregon Hill neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia. Her philanthropy began prior to her uncle Lewis’s death and burgeoned after she inherited a substantial fortune from him in 1897. The mission work of her congregation at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church led Grace to Oregon Hill, a working-class community perched above the James River near Albemarle Paper Company and Tredegar Iron Works. Here, Grace Arents founded St. Andrew’s School and served as its first principal. She funded the building of St. Andrew’s Teachers’ House and a Gothic-style granite and limestone cathedral for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (the first in Richmond in which all pews were free), as well as playgrounds, parks, public housing, and public baths. She opened Richmond’s first public library, which later became a branch of the Richmond Public Library, donated money to the city for an elementary school, and helped establish the Richmond Education Association (REA) and Instructive Visiting Nurses Association (IVNA). Throughout her life, she gave of herself and her wealth quietly, and those gifts made a lasting impact. St. Andrew’s School, the church, REA, and IVNA remain active, as does the botanical garden established on land she bequeathed to the city. St. Andrew’s School and Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden (LGBG) continue to be supported, though not solely, by funds left to sustain them by Grace Arents. As I began to understand the extent of Grace’s influence, I realized I was moving about in the legacy of an important local historical figure, but one whose gender and sense of privacy had obscured her story. I was curious: how did a nineteenth-century woman of means accomplish so much, unhampered and unassisted by a husband, and what sort of life did this strong-willed woman live?

Research would not yield these answers easily. In keeping with her private lifestyle, Grace ordered her personal papers burned when she died. Two travel diaries, a commonplace book, and a handful of letters eluded this fate. When I read them, I was struck by the incomplete picture I’d formed of Grace from biographical profiles that depicted her as a prim, religious, shy, determined, private spinster who cared about public education, libraries, public health, parks, gardens, and architecture. I indeed found confirmation of the way she protected her privacy, such as in a letter in which she politely yet firmly declines a friend’s offer of assistance in regard to a scandal involving her niece Edna. Likewise, her diaries and commonplace book affirm her wide range of interests, including several social causes, and her devotion to her faith. Yet Grace also describes natural beauty with a sense of wonder in her diaries, and recounts the fun she had riding a donkey in a street race in Port Said, and times she socialized late into the evening. Alongside sermons, her commonplace book contains poems about love, loss, and friendship. The articles I’d read about her, even collectively, fell short of capturing this complexity.

In addition to these personal documents, I examined census records, historical newspapers, and passenger lists for traces of Grace, and interviewed people who’ve studied her life, like librarians Patty Parks and Janet Woody; Sharon Francisco and Fran Purdum, who portray Grace and her uncle for LGBG’s Heritage Days; Edwin Slipek, professor and editor; and Lewis Ginter’s biographer, Brian Burns. Of all the documents accumulated about Grace in public archives and private collections, photos are the most elusive. A handful taken in profile exist, and there’s a small portrait of her as a child, but because she refused photographs, there’s no front-facing photo of her as an adult, at least none that those I interviewed are confident is her. Yet last year, LGBG included a front-facing photo of Grace in an exhibit about the garden’s history. It could be her, but I’m not convinced. Perhaps I’m resistant to putting a face with her story since she worked so diligently to avoid photographs. Perhaps I’ve grown accustomed to hearing her voice through her words, witnessing her values through her works, and seeing her in that “beside” view of profile photos. Several times throughout this journey, when I might have studied her gaze eye-to-eye across time in a portrait, I’ve instead visited her gravesite in Hollywood Cemetery or walked along the streets and grounds where she lived and worked. With or without a face to picture in my mind, her story inspires me and has drawn me back, again and again, to sources that hold whispers of that story.

When the research process has frustrated me, as I anticipated it would, connective threads between her life and mine have deepened and sustained my motivation to keep searching, studying, and writing. Although Grace lived in a much higher social class than mine, and in a starkly different time, I’ve found echoes of my life in details of hers: her Dutch ancestry, her passion for education and libraries, her move from North to South, and the long-term companionship she found with another woman. And Grace lived and worked and dreamed a mile away from where I’m sitting right now. Let me share some highlights from my journey to create documentary poetry about Grace Arents, using the five poems included in this issue as markers. It’s my hope that the voice and persona in these poems, informed by both research and imagination, convey Grace’s tenacity, mystery, and complex humanity.

 

One of the first hurdles I encountered, along with the paucity of primary sources extant in Grace’s hand, was developing an authentic vocabulary with which to write the poems. By mining Grace’s words in her travel journals, along with those of poets, writers, and ministers whose lines she copied into her commonplace book, I gleaned lists of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Then, by delving into subjects on which she focused her energy: education (particularly in home and industrial arts), libraries, public health, horticulture, agriculture, and the Episcopal faith, I expanded this wellspring of words, images, and potential metaphors to form a Grace Arents lexicon. I also kept in mind her affinity for painting and drawing, talents for which she won honors in her graduating class at Rutgers Female College, an affinity reflected in diary entries in which she recorded details about the color, light, texture, and contours of her surroundings, and about the paintings, sculptures, and architecture she noticed.

As I immersed myself in the challenge of writing in Grace’s voice, I sensed the tension in the ways she resisted or pushed beyond society’s expectations of women, particularly by overseeing the construction of St. Andrew’s Church. Tension emerged as a recurrent theme in her life, a theme I wanted to introduce early in her story. Several passages she copied into her commonplace book resonate with the tension of things held back or held in, such as the one in fig. 1: “What a curious thing the real, secret history of a man’s or woman’s life is! . . . it is never written or told. There are secret vices, or wishes, or schemes, or crimes, which are never whispered or put into words; and there are hidden virtues and hopes and plans and goodness which cannot be told.”

Her father’s work as a cooper provided an apt metaphor for holding things in, inspiring the poem “Coopering Lesson, c. 1855,” which demanded another layer of vocabulary: the language of barrel-making. Public records show that Stephen Arents died in 1855 when Grace was seven or eight, a fact that established a boundary as to when I could place this poem in time. Fortunately, a verse that Grace copied into her sister Mary’s commonplace book circa 1855, containing lines like “Be thy spirits ever unshrouded,” suggests Grace could read and write formal texts by this same year. It seemed reasonable that she would also have some familiarity with the terminology of her father’s trade. As I revised “Coopering Lesson,” I shaped the form to evoke a barrel so that the poem’s appearance amplifies the tension pressed into its lines.

 

In contrast to the opening poem’s reflection of a broad theme, the spark for “Commencement” came from a specific source, one I found shortly after discovering where Grace attended college. Her 1867 class was the first to graduate after the institution’s name was changed from Rutgers Female Institute to Rutgers Female College. After I uncovered this fact in an article in the June 27, 1867, issue of New York Observer and Chronicle, I found the full text of the president’s address that Henry M. Pierce gave at her commencement in the HathiTrust Digital Library. I had wondered how Grace developed the confidence to operate in spheres typically dominated by men. Pierce’s address provides a glimpse into the educational environment that helped instill such confidence, as reflected in this passage: “I am fully persuaded that the time is not far distant, when it will be thought incredible that the question of the inferiority of woman should ever have been seriously debated. For it is not without higher warrant than that of human reason, that I would claim for woman an equal place by the side of man.” Pierce goes on to assert a faith-based defense for women’s equality and equal liberal education, at one point saying (in relation to an interpretation of Proverbs), “yield not to the mean spirit, that thinks that whatever is conceded to woman, is so much taken from the birthright of man.” As a woman deeply committed to the Episcopal faith (values reflected in her diary and life work), this biblical argument would have resonated with young Grace. The first time I read Pierce’s words, I caught myself holding my breath as I imagined what it must have been like to be a young woman hearing this message nearly 150 years ago. I constructed the poem “Commencement” in the spirit of Pierce’s message, drawing most words for the poem directly from his text.

At this point in the project, my writing stalled. For the manuscript to work, I needed a form that could move the narrative further in one poem than the half-dozen poems I had written so far, a form that could also reveal more of Grace’s personality and language. Taking cues from collections like Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Anna, washing by Ted Genoways, as well as advice from my poetry mentor Laure-Anne Bosselaar-Brown, I began to write epistolary poems addressed to the sibling who outlived Grace: her sister Minnie. By addressing Minnie, the poems in Grace’s persona could follow the full arc of Grace’s life. Since Minnie and her daughter Edna accompanied Grace on an overseas trip with their uncle Lewis (as documented in Grace’s 1896 travel diary and in passenger lists) this choice could also provide opportunities to make direct references to their shared experiences. “Stereocard, c. 1893” and “Böhme’s Theory, c. 1905” are among the letter poems that emerged.

 

“Stereocard, c. 1893” centers on a metaphor evocative of a photographic method familiar to Americans in the Progressive era, particularly to travelers like Grace. Through historic images and newspaper articles about Rutgers Female College and the elegant House of Mansions where the college was located when Grace attended, I learned about the towers, windows, and telescope referenced in the first stanza. Given the building’s stature, it’s likely that a stereocard of the House of Mansions actually exists, although I haven’t found one yet. Ship’s registers in genealogical databases revealed the words “spinster” and “none” listed beside Grace’s name under “calling.” In the third stanza, the italicized text “Only one of her daughters is married” is excerpted from an obituary for Grace’s mother, Jane Arents, that was published on the front page of The Richmond Dispatch on July 30, 1890, a document available through Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

Similarly, “Böhme’s Theory, c. 1905” knits together period details with documentary traces of Grace. Given her wide reading on a variety of topics, Christianity among them, Grace would likely have known of Böhme. Likewise, considering her dedication to improving living conditions for the working-class Oregon Hill community and her continued ties to New York City through family members who remained there, Grace would likely have been aware of tenement conditions. Her frequent inclusion of poems in her commonplace book makes it likely she would have read Emily Dickinson’s poems after they were published in 1890. Along with these historical contexts, Grace’s 1888 travel diary provided details about clothing items like bloomers and the description of shifting colors in the waters near Honolulu, an excerpt which appears in fig. 5. It reads, “I do not know when I have seen anything more wonderfully beautiful than the colors on the water as we left these islands—This ocean itself is always of a wonderful blue sometimes of an inky blackness and then of every stage to a blue white—but in the harbor of Honolulu it changed to a deep green—as we left this faded to a paler shade then took a rosy hue & gradually through many tints almost rainbow like we passed back to blue again. I was told these colors are the effect of the water on the coral reefs.”

Later in the poem, the story about plucking holly from the Kenilworth ruins is drawn from Grace’s 1896 diary, while the phrase “pendant with” echoes her 1888 diary description of forests near Monterey “where for the first time [she] saw. . . Florida moss pendant from the branches of the trees.” Other epistolary poems in the manuscript reflect a kaleidoscope of source material as well.

Along with my desire to understand Grace’s life, ever since I first read about her, I’ve wanted to know more about the companion to whom she left a modest inheritance and lifetime rights to reside at Bloemendaal: Mary Garland Smith. Unfortunately, the last name Smith has made tracing her story even more frustrating than finding fragments of Grace’s life in public documents and historic records. Yet I’m grateful that even this search has yielded a few tiny bursts of research joy. School and census records confirm details commonly recounted in articles about Grace, such as Mary Garland Smith succeeding Grace as principal of St. Andrew’s School. The 1910 census shows that Mary Garland Smith was residing at St. Andrew’s Teachers’ House and “Principal” was noted as her occupation. In 1920 and subsequent census records, she lived at Bloemendaal. The 1920 and 1940 census records also indicate that she was born in Virginia and suggest she may have preferred being called Garland rather than Mary. The 1920 census lists her as Garland M. Smith, the 1940 census as M. Garland Smith. Even if she did not go by Garland with everyone, the codicil to Grace’s will includes this statement: “I have left the Farm with everything on it to Garland for her life.” When I extended my search to genealogical databases, I found her 1922 passport application and a passenger list for the SS Scythia’s voyage from Liverpool to New York that August. In case you’re wondering (as I was), Grace’s name does not appear on the same passenger list. Still, the application reveals Mary Garland’s birthplace as Essex County, Virginia, and includes a photograph and a description of her appearance.

 

When I make presentations about Grace, people often ask whether Grace and Garland were a couple in the sense that some women, like my wife and me, are today. It’s certainly possible, but since there are no records that suggest romantic ties, I’ve chosen to imagine them as close friends and companions who loved each other, shared a passion for education, and who knew each other for at least 19 years, from 1907 when Mary Garland Smith became principal of St. Andrew’s School until Grace’s death in 1926. In their era, intimate friendships among women sometimes sparked scrutiny; however, women in Grace’s social class were less often subjected to such critical examination. Along with Grace’s fierce protection of her privacy, their choice to live together outside the city on a farm at Bloemendaal further shielded them. It did not surprise me when I discovered that despite their companionship and the life rights Grace granted to Garland in her will, none of Grace’s obituaries mentioned Mary Garland Smith. Although it’s impossible to know how Garland felt about this omission, I expect it mattered little to her compared to the absence of Grace. It is this loss of a dear friend and the sense of emptiness that follows that I’ve tried to capture in “How It Was,” a poem from Garland’s perspective.

My journey with Grace and Garland is still in progress. I’m grateful that my work has already connected more people with their story and augmented the details in the Grace stories that are told, such as the inclusion of her graduation from Rutgers Female College in an LGBG display about the garden’s history. The five poems published here represent part of the narrative arc for a book-length manuscript about Grace Evelyn Arents. Yet questions remain. Where did Grace stand on suffrage? Did she correspond or work with Maggie L. Walker, a famous contemporary of hers? Was she involved in responding when the 1918 influenza epidemic reached Richmond? Did Grace and Garland ever travel together? What did Garland do before she became principal of St. Andrew’s and after Grace’s death? Several poems I envision in the arc of their story require additional research before I put pen to paper. I continue to research, learn, and write, and to walk with Grace—and Garland.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3.5 (July, 2016).

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Wendy DeGroat’s poetry has appeared in U.S. and U.K. publications, including Raleigh Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, About Place, Mslexia, and TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism. With roots in northern New Jersey where her ancestors’ 1865 cabin was restored by Montclair State University to serve as a site for teaching early American history, she is currently a librarian in Richmond, Virginia, where she also teaches writing workshops and curates poetryriver.org, a resource site for reading and learning about documentary poetry, and for diversifying the poetic voices taught in high school and undergraduate classrooms.

According to Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America, nineteenth-century reading offered rich, often therapeutic fantasies of connection that were more detailed, more corporeal, and more exclusive than has been previously noticed. Rather than the visions of abstract and anonymous community advanced by Benedict Anderson, Stanley Fish, and Michael Warner, Gillian Silverman proposes a model of “communion,” a term meant to indicate a form of connection characterized by exclusivity, intimacy, and physicality (2). Reading, she argues, was not experienced as “creat[ing] broad affiliations along national or demographic lines,” but was valued more concretely for its ability to advance “a heightened connection to a specific other”—most often, in the examples she provides, between an author and reader (ix-x). Rather than seeing reading as an imperfect substitute for face-to-face interactions, as a compensatory move aimed at rebuilding connections lost through the atomizing effects of the market revolution, Silverman suggests that reading instead offered the means to even deeper, submersive engagement with “otherwise inaccessible” others—the physically distant, the socially proscribed, even the dead (ix). Drawing at times from psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, and cognitive studies—and premised on book history’s designation of reading as an encounter with “the sensual reality of the book itself”—Bodies and Books argues that the materiality of the book gave rise to an imagination of reading as “bodily merger,” “consubstantiality,” and “mutual ensoulment” and as a redemption of psychic loss (7, x, 19).

To do so, Bodies and Books operates at two distinct scales, the broad and the painstakingly close. The first two chapters propose broad models of reading by amassing and then quickly surveying evidence of nineteenth-century reading practices—the letters of the well- and not-known, treatises on reading, conduct books, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Henry David Thoreau’s “Reading” fromWalden (1854), Mary Austin’s 1932 autobiography,Earth Horizon, etc. From such evidence, Chapter 1, titled “Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading,” develops two distinct models of reading that Silverman argues emerged in response to antebellum industrial change, and particularly to the rise of the railroad and the voluminous increase of printed texts. “Railroad reading” names the highly disciplined, instrumental, time-bound model of reading recommended in the pages of conduct manuals. In letters and journals, however, many readers described a practice Silverman calls “wayward reading,” a more pleasurable, time-wasting pursuit devoted not to the consolidation of the self but to its imagined merger with authors. The second chapter, “Books and the Dead,” offers another perspective on author-reader communion by arguing that nineteenth-century readers perceived books as animate things, not repositories of “cold type” or “‘dead things in stiff bindings,'” that fostered connection with dead authors (66, 51). Noting the resonances between the discourses of spiritualism and reading, Silverman argues that reading did not seek to replicate face-to-face interactions, but instead took the paranormal for its paradigm, a more appropriate register in which to understand how books might come alive, the dead might come close, and communion between author and reader might be achieved. In these first chapters, Silverman is concerned with reading writ large: her analysis is not tied to particular genres, genders, races, localities, or ages, as is often the case in more deeply historical studies. Instead, to demonstrate both that these imaginations of reading circulated broadly through nineteenth-century culture and that union, not difference or individuality, was readers’ goal, Silverman suspends the identifying markers that might tie these imaginations more firmly to time and place. Authors, readers, and texts therefore circulate promiscuously, if a bit haphazardly, through these pages.

After the broad survey of these opening chapters, the final three chapters constitute a dramatic shift in scale and focus, as they plunge into discrete case studies that examine the intricate imaginations of reading and writing found within literary texts while paying less attention to audiences outside the text. Chapter 3, “Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville’s Pierre,” offers one of the most cogent interpretations of Melville’s novel available in scholarship today by deftly accounting for many of the novel’s most bizarre features—its bending and twisting of language, the incest that saturates it, and the spectacular nature of its commercial and critical failures. Silverman positions Pierre as attempting to resolve the conflict between “Melville’s acute desire for literary originality” and “his equally consuming preoccupation with sympathetic, intercorporeal experience,” which he believed would be found not in a mass readership but in a select group of readers attuned to his genius (85, 86). In Silverman’s argument, the incest that runs riot in this novel—most notably in the sham marriage between the protagonist Pierre Glendinning and his half-sister Isabel Banford—corresponds to a vision of authorship that can be both original and profoundly connected, for incest advances intimate connections while resisting conformity and the replication of a stifling status quo. So might authorship allow for communion with readers without succumbing to the imitative quality of popular prose.

In this chapter, Silverman labels the intense author-reader bond that Melville describes and desires in Pierre “textual sentimentalism,” but that term is not applied to the similarly intense bonds that characterize other reading relationships throughout Bodies and Books, nor to the subject of the fifth chapter, one of the most sentimental of nineteenth-century books, Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850). Indeed, the general absence of the mediating terms of literary history, including sentimentalism and sensationalism, contributes to the polarity of scale in Bodies and Books, while raising the question of whether the prominence of these genres in the nineteenth century contributed to the fantasies of reading that Silverman catalogs.

Chapter 4, “Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,” covers familiar territory. Silverman argues here that Douglass perceived reading and writing as embodied practices and, consequently, as a way of drawing physically close to a northern white readership—not all of that readership, but to “a select group of sympathetic readers, whom he imagines as psychic and bodily extensions of himself” (105). The pursuit of this argument follows digressive paths, including a discussion of Douglass’s relationship with literacy and Sophia Auld, the mistress and mother-figure who began to teach him to read, with a detour through the family romance theory of Jacques Lacan, and an extended consideration of why Douglass changed his aunt’s name from Hester in the 1845Narrative to Esther in the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom. The latter point includes the claim—repeatedly acknowledged to be speculative—that Douglass changed his aunt’s name after reading The Scarlet Letter (1852) out of a conscious or unconscious desire to divorce his Hester from an association with Hester Prynne’s errant sexuality. As the chapter’s argument winds along these paths, we do not glimpse the white readers with whom Douglass imagined himself to be so profoundly, radically connected. In this chapter, Bodies and Books‘ often implicit tension between fantasy and embodiment, imagination and materiality becomes more striking, as the communion that Silverman argues they combine to achieve never fully materializes.

Chapter 5, titled “‘The Polishing Attrition’: Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner,” argues that Warner disciplined her reading practices—limiting the time she spent reading for pleasure, forcing herself to read more difficult material, and trying to remain still as she read for hours on end—to paradoxically heighten her appreciation of reading’s pleasures. For Warner, reading’s satisfactions were obtained through self-regulation: embodiment is experienced through the bodily aches that follow from keeping still, and the letter read after a long wait offers a deeper thrill. Silverman also traces the link between asceticism and pleasure in Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, in which the protagonist Ellen Montgomery’s initially unruly reading practices are disciplined through religious devotion: her “Bible lust” becomes “Bible love” (140). While books are most often understood in this study as simple repositories of text—or of their authors—the material book re-enters to great effect in this chapter, as Silverman traces the pleasure Warner (and Ellen) took in the materiality of novels and Bibles, reveling in the outline of a book felt through a Christmas stocking or agog over gilt and colored leather bindings. This case study, as well as the two preceding chapters, will reward those interested in the specific texts that Silverman examines. However, while each chapter traces how particular authors understood reading as offering fantasies of communion, their insights specify but don’t further develop the strain of reading that Silverman argues was so endemic and valued in the nineteenth century. The connection between the central argument of Silverman’s book and its expression in these final chapters therefore often seems attenuated.

Nevertheless, Bodies and Books offers a valuable supplement to the models of reading that condition our understanding of historical and present-day reading practices. Dramatically shifting the scale of affiliations that reading might create from publics or nations to, for the most part, dyads of authors and readers, from communities to communion, allows us to look through the eyes of individual, nineteenth-century readers at the books and the people they saw through them and to reconsider how impersonal the mechanism of print was perceived to be. However, something is also lost in this dramatic shift in scale. In building a model of reading as intimate communion, Silverman suspends a consideration of how affiliations develop among groups of readers, large and small. If one problem with theoretical models of print publics is that they ask reading to do a lot of work—even creating nations—perhaps Silverman is asking reading to do too little by providing a vision of reading that doesn’t allow for communities beyond the scale of the paired reader and author.

While Silverman positions herself against the anonymity and abstraction that characterize theoretical models of print publics, those qualities nonetheless infiltrate the author-reader dyad at the center of her study and, in some measure, make possible its fantasies of intimate and exclusive communion. In the author-reader relationships that occupy much of the book, we often see the imagination of communion originating from author or reader, but we rarely see an answering imagination that would confirm that relation: authors and readers therefore remain anonymous to each other. When communion between readers receives mention, that communion does achieve more material expression, but isn’t created by a shared experience or imagination of reading. Instead, reading becomes the occasion to strengthen or maintain relationships that already exist: the sympathy between Hawthorne and Melville is strengthened by Hawthorne’s appreciation of Moby-Dick, and the Warner sisters bond over books.

Indeed, while the title of Silverman’s book names two material entities—bodies and books—her emphasis falls more surely on the rich, detailed, satisfying imaginations to which bodies and books gave rise. Silverman argues that the ability of books to spur the imaginative collapse of real distances (even the separation between the living and the dead) enabled reading to play a therapeutic, valued role. Bodies and Books therefore contributes a resolute focus on the importance of readers’ imaginations to their own satisfactions, and it also deftly brings that focus into the present. Silverman’s epilogue takes up the question of how historical practices of reading can illuminate how we read today—including the digital reading experience in which you, dear reader, are currently engaged. Her welcome attempt to loosen academic reading’s stranglehold on how we understand and value reading surfaces throughout Bodies and Books. Scholarly work, Silverman points out, depends on a model of reading characterized by poaching, resistance, and suspicion and “hinges on our ability to differentiate ourselves from the text and its prior receptions …” (16). Practicing this kind of reading might cause us to miss—or misinterpret—the vision of reading as intense and intimate, spiritual and bodily, that was so common and so valued in the nineteenth century—and today. Among its other achievements, Bodies and Booksdraws attention to the gap between the models of reading that premise critical writing and those that offer other deep, sustaining satisfactions, making the resonant point that there is more than one way to close read.

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“In Pursuit of a Vision: Two Centuries of Collecting at the American Antiquarian Society,” an exhibition at the Grolier Club, September 12-November 17, 2012. Accompanying catalogue published by the American Antiquarian Society, 2012. After musing among the old buildings and tombstones of Boston on a hot August day in 1834, Christopher Columbus Baldwin, librarian for the American Antiquarian Society, exclaimed in his diary, “How much of fashion, wealth, wit, and learning are now buried in oblivion!” This statement served as a rallying call for a unique rescue mission on a grand scale. A mission to rescue the present—to thwart the obscuring powers of time and preserve the materials of “fashion, wealth, wit, and learning” for future generations. Baldwin, along with a host of other individuals, made this mission their life’s work and in so doing built the remarkable collections of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). Their stories, as well as the things they collected, were recently displayed in an exhibition at New York City’s Grolier Club, “In Pursuit of a Vision: Two Centuries of Collecting at the American Antiquarian Society,” and in its accompanying catalogue. Though the physical exhibition has closed, “In Pursuit of a Vision” and its remarkable collected objects remain accessible in an online exhibition.

This goal—to collect and preserve the materials of the present—crafted not simply one vision of American history and culture, that of a nascent nation or a literary laboratory, for instance, but rather a multitude of at once complementary and competing versions of American culture. That so many visions can be contained in one exhibition is the particular strength not only of this show, but also of the American Antiquarian Society itself. Founded in 1812 in Worcester, Massachusetts, by printer Isaiah Thomas, the AAS was intended as a learned society devoted to “American Antiquities, natural, artificial, and literary” (14). Thomas’ initial donations documenting early American print culture, a focus of the opening display of the exhibit, demonstrate the broadly inclusive early collection practices that contributed to the breadth and depth of the AAS’s holdings. Along with his two-volume History of Printing in America, published in 1810, a 1787 print type specimen book, as well as contemporary newspapers and broadsides gathered nationwide, Thomas also contributed a three-volume collection of popular songs and ballads culled from the shops and streets of early nineteenth-century Boston. Thomas’ rationale for inclusion: “to shew what articles of this kind are in vogue with the Vulgar at this time” (23). Years later, these “vulgar” articles, now more politely termed “popular literature,” are indeed valuable and much-studied historical artifacts. This inclusive collecting vision, one that sought to value the materials of the present no matter how they might be perceived or used in the future, defined the AAS’s early mission and cast the institution as a chronicler and creator of American histories. Beginning with Thomas’ initial gift of 2,650 titles, the research library currently boasts nearly 750,000 volumes, over 2 million newspaper issues, as well as large collections of periodicals, graphic arts, children’s literature, and manuscripts (7). From the rooms of Thomas’ Worcester mansion, the collections now occupy over twenty-five miles of shelving in Antiquarian Hall, the third building designed and built for the research library. Of these twenty-five miles of collections, some 200 individual artifacts are included in the bicentennial exhibition at the Grolier Club. These artifacts range from print sources such as books, almanacs, manuscripts, and newspapers to the graphic arts of photography, cartoon illustration, and portraiture, to objects such as coffee beans and medals. In the eleven glass display cases outlining the walls of the Grolier Club’s exhibition hall, these artifacts are organized not according to a single theme as is common in an exhibition, but rather according to the individuals whose personal collecting interests and efforts built the inventory of the AAS. Organizing the exhibition according to individual collectors inspires a number of valuable insights. One encounters a variety of stories in each glass case—the artifact’s historical significance, its path to the AAS, its relation to the other objects collected and valued by that individual. We are thus encouraged to view American history and culture not as a series of events or illustrious personages, but rather as a specific act, a collective and collecting impulse that begins with a single individual but often ends with that individual’s disappearance behind the artifact. Indeed, in glancing over the glass cases, the collector—honored with a written description and often, a miniature portrait—rather fades into the background as the three-dimensional objects claim space and attention. Yet one remains aware that the very presence of the objects is owed entirely to the individual they surround and frame. The experience of reading the exhibition catalogue is slightly different, though no less suggestive. Titled after the exhibition, the catalogue transforms the display cases into chapters. In thoughtful and engaging introductory essays penned by AAS curators the individual collectors speak first and loudest. Beautiful images and detailed, often entertaining descriptions of the exhibition artifacts follow. Reading the catalogue, one is more cognizant of the unique personalities behind the collecting story of each artifact. Consider the fascinating Chase sisters. After arriving in Virginia from Worcester in 1863 to teach in the freedman’s schools, Lucy and Sarah E. Chase devoted considerable effort to gathering materials on the slave trade and the Civil War. Their collecting efforts—self-described as “ransacking” (49)—led them into the abandoned offices ofJefferson Davis and to those leftover coffee beans in General Grant’s City Point headquarters. Thinking about these artifacts through the Chases invites one to consider the varied practices and idiosyncrasies of documenting historical events (breaking and entering as collecting practice?). Another artifact, abroadside from the Charleston Mercury shouting, “The Union is Dissolved!” made its way into the AAS’ collections after being ripped from a Charleston wall and mailed. These very physical and material paths are often lost once an artifact is deposited in a repository—a portion of its own story fades in service to the researcher’s goals. This exhibition and catalogue remind us that the road taken—from event and place to collector to collection—is as historically significant as the artifact itself. From the idiosyncratic ransacker to the focused obsessive to the systematic librarian, “In Pursuit of a Vision” pays homage to the dedicated efforts of the collector. Through their stories and the materials they gathered, we are offered a glimpse into how history is really made—physically and materially through the act of collecting. Though the exhibition and catalogue weave together a variety of visions of American culture through the artifacts on display, the dominant view is of the immense organizational efforts of acquiring, classifying, and disseminating knowledge, no less evident in the mission and history of the AAS than in the vade mecums, catalogues, and bibliographies on display. This energetic “pursuit”—of knowledge, of history—continues in the present mission of the AAS, and forms a final sort of “work in progress” in the exhibition and catalogue. From its pioneer efforts in microprint to today’s digital full-text Early American Imprints series, the AAS has prioritized access to its collections, an obviously crucial component to historical study and the production of knowledge. Programming for teachers and scholars, fellowship and research opportunities, and its monumental five-volume A History of the Book in Americaseries are only a few of the myriad ways the AAS seeks to engage the public and open its treasures to study. Its digital efforts, including the detailed online catalogue, a variety of online and in-house databases, such as the digital image archive, Gigi, as well as the “Past Is Present” blog, and, of course, this publication, are a significant outgrowth of the AAS’s original mission to, in Isaiah Thomas’ own elevated view, “enlarge the sphere of human knowledge . . . and improve and interest posterity” (14). The exhibition cases dedicated to collection development and responsible stewardship offer a few screenshots of early digital resources and the catalogue mentions them; however (and ignoring the very real likelihood of technological limitations), it would have been fitting to be able to browse and search these resources in the exhibition space itself. What better way to demonstrate the complex processes of collecting, organizing, and disseminating information as well as the continuing evolution of the AAS’s vision? After all, the ordered nature of an exhibition and catalogue—contained, labeled, organized—can only gesture toward the searching, scrambling, backtracking, and fortuitous discovering that characterize both collecting and the pursuit of knowledge.

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Kristen Highland is a PhD candidate in the English Department at New York University and a recent Botein Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. Her dissertation explores the physical, social, and cultural spaces of antebellum New York City bookstores.

Samuel Danforth’s 1674 sermon on the execution of Benjamin Goad, convicted of bestiality with a mare, endures as more than a sensationalist relic from Puritan New England. The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into; Upon Occasion of the Arraignment and Condemnation of Benjamin Goad, for His Prodigious Villany is the first published execution sermon, lending itself as a critical text to American genealogies of religious and political ideology, deviance, and punishment. This sermon from Roxbury, Massachusetts, captures one episode in a series of bestiality trials and executions that were the lesser-known counterpart to the infamous alleged outbreaks of witchcraft in colonial America; men, rather than women, were accused of this crime. Through Danforth’s use of the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah to frame Goad’s case, individual sins of the flesh radiate outward and threaten to corrupt the social and moral foundations of Puritan culture uneasily settled in unfamiliar lands.

Danforth’s condemnation combines biblical exegesis with ongoing paradigmatic anxieties about the fragility of American civilization. Although Goad’s crime is bestiality, sometimes also called “buggery,” this is but one of a cluster of sins that the minister views as variations of the great evil of “uncleanness,” which include homosexuality, masturbation, adultery, sex work, incest, and disobedience to parents and “masters.” Using the rhetoric of disease and pollution, the Harvard-educated minister affirms that the death sentence is the only way to purge the community of the young man’s evils or else risk the downfall of society. While the Puritans feared the encroachment of the wilderness on their borders, the greater, paradoxical fear was of the perversion of the natural order lurking within human nature itself. Sodom acts as the great signifier of dangerous difference; according to Michael Warner, Sodom and sodomy were popular Puritan referents for political and national rhetoric already infused with the erotic. The sermon ends with a stern list of social and religious corrective actions to stave off other forms of wickedness among Goad’s peers. This concluding affirmation of proper education in relation to established institutions inserts this analysis of Goad’s hanging into that familiar subgenre of the jeremiad about the deteriorating state of the youth as an expression of fears stemming from generational differences. The jeremiad, a literary form dedicated to the apocalyptic denunciation of declining morality in society, was a characteristic mode for many Puritan sermons.

John Winthrop famously called the New England colonies “a wilderness, where are nothing but wild beasts and beastlike men.” In The Cry Of Sodom, animals operate on both literal and figurative levels, suggesting the potential for rich readings pertinent to considerations of race, sexuality, biopolitics, animal studies, and ecocriticism in early American studies. The Western construction of the human depends upon the abjection of animals; as Colleen Boggs argues about the role of sex and animals under the law, (white) human exceptionalism requires the criminalization of the animal, indicating how the category of the non-human is both absolute but also dangerously porous. The discursive slippage between bestiality and other sexual acts deemed “unnatural,” such as homosexuality and miscegenation, makes The Cry of Sodom continually resonant.

We can also consider the underlying clash between Western and Indigenous ideas of ontology and ecology; Danforth’s sermon enacts a rhetorical form of settler colonialism by imposing the human-animal binary on stolen lands that are doubly dispossessed through the silence of Indigenous perspectives and peoples. Ironically, the domesticated European animal is the particular point of vulnerability for the Puritans even as such beasts act as weapons of settler colonial biological warfare.

The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into; Upon Occasion of the Arraignment and Condemnation of Benjamin Goad, for His Prodigious Villany is available on Digital Commons @ University of Lincoln-Nebraska and Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership.

Further Reading

For a brief selection of writings on The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into, see John Canup’s “‘The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into’: Bestiality and the Wilderness of Human Nature in Seventeenth-Century New England,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 98 (1988): 113-34; John M. Murrin’s “‘Things Fearful to Name’: Bestiality in Colonial America,” Pennsylvania History 65 (1998): 8-43; Robert F. Oaks’s “‘Things Fearful to Name’: Sodomy and Buggery in Seventeenth-Century New England,” Journal of Social History 12 (1978-79): 268-81; and Michael Warner’s “New English Sodom,” American Literature 64.1 (1992): 19-47. On relevant discussions of animals in the American context, see, for example, Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York, 2006); Colleen Glenney Boggs’s Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (New York, 2014); and Gregory Cajete’s Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe, 1995).  A starting point to a relevant context for early American sexuality can include John D’Emilio’s Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America; Richard Godbeer’s Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore, 2002); and Edmund S. Morgan’s “The Puritans and Sex,” The New England Quarterly 15.4 (1942): 591-60.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3 (Spring, 2017).

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Christine “Xine” Yao is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia; she recently completed her PhD in English at Cornell University. She is working on a book project on queer, racialized, and gendered forms of unfeeling as dissent in long nineteenth-century American literature through histories of science and law. She has published or has work forthcoming in J19, Occasion, Canadian Literature, College Literature, and American Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Xine is the co-host of PhDivas, an iTunes podcast about academia, culture, and social justice across the STEM/humanities divide dedicated to supporting women, particularly women of color, in higher education.

Historians have long used metaphors drawn from geology and archaeology to describe their work; they are always “digging into archives,” “excavating the past,” and “uncovering layers of evidence.” In his new survey of the history of colonial North America, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts, Daniel K. Richter adopts this formula with great success, using the core lessons of geology to structure his argument. Two of the central obstacles in writing a synthetic history of early America are making each distinct phase relevant to the next and doing so without casting the sum as mere prelude to the American Revolution. Richter deals with these two structural difficulties by uniting them, arguing that early America can best be understood by analyzing how each of six cultural phases (those created by, in his terms, Progenitors, Conquistadors, Traders, Planters, Imperialists, Atlanteans) “rested on—and took its shape from—the remains of what came before” (3). Though the Revolution layer may have “spread over the older ones,” Richter argues that “what came before never fully disappeared. Indeed, the new was always a product of the old, made from bits and pieces retained from deeper strata” (4).

By showing that the significant differences in social organization that Europeans and Native Americans inherited in the sixteenth century were a result not of long-seated differences but rather recent transformations, Richter forces readers to see the categories “Native” and “European” as historically contingent and dynamic, not timeless and universal.

One of the hallmarks that we have come to expect from Richter’s scholarship is his ability to turn what we think of as normative on its head and exploit our momentary vertigo to great rhetorical success; this book is no exception. In the first section, “Progenitors,” Richter does not paint a picture of fundamental difference between Native and European societies on the eve of contact, as is common in similar synthetic histories. Rather, Richter delves further into the ancient past to find that North Americans and Europeans shared much. On both sides of the Atlantic, he argues, unmistakably similar societies grew out of a 400-year period of climate change called the Medieval Warm Period (900 to 1300 C.E.) that brought a lengthened growing season and a stable climate. In both North America and Europe, agricultural work was central to daily life and subsistence; in each, the ability of small groups of elites to mobilize a labor force to perform this work and to control its products created great disparities between rich and poor, and in each elites strengthened and consolidated their positions by controlling access to outside resources and to the spiritual world.

As much as these groups shared, however, “the bizarre European custom” of primogeniture, “according to which individual warriors were entitled to possess land in perpetuity, pass it on to their lineal descendants in the male line, and force others to do the work of making it productive,” ultimately meant that when each confronted the challenges that the Little Ice Age brought after 1300, each would respond differently (42). Whereas strong kingdoms, now verging on nation-states, supported by large armies and tax revenue and born of conquest, were the result of economic crisis in Europe, decentralized chiefdoms bound together by matrilineal kinship, diplomacy, and trade networks evolved in North America. By showing that the significant differences in social organization that Europeans and Native Americans inherited in the sixteenth century were a result not of long-seated differences but rather recent transformations, Richter forces readers to see the categories “Native” and “European” as historically contingent and dynamic, not timeless and universal. Such a maneuver allows Richter to offer a history of colonial America that is a product not of the inevitable contest of incompatible cultures, but rather of a series of human responses to changing circumstances.

A second important feature of Richter’s argument is his insistence that European political, religious, and economic development were central in the experience of all the inhabitants of North America. While not wholly a new premise, what is remarkable about Richter’s efforts is that he balances careful consideration of metropolitan affairs with close attention to how those policies were worked out on the ground. Here Richter’s cultural layers work exceedingly well, allowing him to illuminate how preexisting structures shaped new waves of colonization and to fully integrate colonial and imperial histories.

For example, Richter’s discussion of “Nieu Nederlandt,” based on the recent flurry of work on that Dutch colony, pays close attention to the ways that Dutch trade was instrumental to the success both of Native Americans and Europeans in the mid-seventeenth-century northeast. Before the English arrived in significant numbers, it was Dutch traders working from trading posts on the South (Delaware), North (Hudson), and Fresh (Connecticut) Rivers, who knit together a regional economy based on the exchange of furs, wampum, and European goods in the 1620s and 1630s. As thousands of English planters arrived in subsequent decades to build agricultural communities in New England and the Chesapeake, Dutch commerce remained important, with these Englishmen and women “superimpose[ing] themselves on a trading network dominated by the Dutch West Indian Company and its various affiliated and disaffected merchants” (213).

In coming decades, New Netherland’s traders continued to play an outsized role in supplying English colonies in New England and the Chesapeake with manufactured goods, European foodstuffs, African slaves, and markets for English settlers’ tobacco. Though the prevalence of Anglo-Dutch exchange in early America is now well known, Richter’s careful efforts to show that those networks predated and made possible English settlement is important in reorienting the way that Anglo-Dutch trade is often understood. Instead of seeing the cross-national relationships Dutch and English colonists built as aberrant, as British metropolitan officials did, Richter portrays them as organically arising out of the messiness of the colonial situation, with British monopolistic trade laws as artificially imposed from outside.

Representative of an imperial vision for the Americas that found its origins in European politics and culture as opposed to experience on the ground in the Americas, England’s efforts to limit Dutch trade in North America in Richter’s telling blends well with another of his chief arguments: that England’s Restoration policies were key to colonial history and that they were central in producing the violence that swept English America in the 1670s.

Richter’s understanding of the centrality of the Restoration in the history of early America comes through most clearly in his retelling of Bacon’s Rebellion. Not so much refuting as side-stepping earlier work, Richter argues that the way to understand the rebellion and its place in Chesapeake history is to see it not through Nathaniel Bacon’s eyes, but through those of Virginia governor William Berkeley. In Berkeley, Richter finds someone who held tensions between metropolitan and periphery within himself. On the one hand, the court-connected Berkeley and the coterie of great planters he surrounded himself with worked to make Virginia into the “neo-feudal utopia” Restoration officials imagined as they consolidated economic and political power during the 1660s (271). Even if their interests aligned with metropolitan imperialists on issues such as distrust of representational government, the embrace of African slavery, and the pursuit of peaceful relations with Native Americans, Berkeley and his planter allies deviated sharply with “Restoration imperialism[‘s]” assault on Dutch trade because of its deleterious effect, in their view, on tobacco prices (280). Though they did not support the violent consequences of Bacon’s Rebellion, these great planters’ opposition to the Navigation Acts sprang from the same conditions that prompted debt-ridden and desperate colonists to join Bacon in seizing Native American land. In Richter’s account, therefore, metropolitan changes in policy were as responsible for producing Bacon’s Rebellion as were colonial issues.

The downside to all this attention to the imperial reshuffling of the 1660s and 1670s and the Glorious Revolution (which Richter discusses alongside the Restoration) is that the rest of the book, in which he charts the movement of commodities, ideas, and peoples in the eighteenth century that bound the Atlantic more closely together and created its distinctive “polyglot social forms,” seems more like a coda to the transformations of the half-century before than a determinative phase in and of itself (7). Though Richter recounts the European, African, and Native American migrations that marked this period, the violence of slavery, and the opulence of the transatlantic consumer culture that slavery fueled, the major action of the book is over. As he races towards the “cataclysm” of the Seven Years War, however, he again hits his stride, bringing conflict between Native American traditions, colonial interests, and imperial desires back together again. In that imperial scramble, he contends, “Native American traditions of property, land, trade and power smashed against those of Europeans, in turn setting land-grabbing creole planters against imperial officials” and destroying “the fragile unity of the Atlantean world” (389).

A successful synthetic history—one that is far-reaching in its vision and yet contains enough detail and nuance to make compelling claims—requires a talented writer, and Richter is that. One sentence tucked into his discussion of the origins of feudalism and its connection to Christianity captures his skill in distilling huge transformations into beautiful prose. “In that village church, meanwhile—as in the great Christian cathedrals that, throughout Europe, served the function of temple mounds—a creed originally preached by a wandering prophet of forgiveness who had been executed in the most ignoble way mutated into a religion focused on an authoritarian judge-king who, on the Last Day, would wield his sword, cast his enemies into the fires of Hell, and grant arbitrary pardon to the few who acknowledged his lordship over all and had paid the price for their sins in this world and in Purgatory” (43).

A sweeping narrative intended for general readers, students, and historians alike, Richter has offered a gripping and enjoyable book (it is burdened only by footnotes relating to quoted materials) that does what few comparable syntheses accomplish: advance a powerful argument about the ways that colonial cultures continued to shape early America long after they were buried.

As approaching British warships menaced Manhattan in the summer of 1776, George Washington nevertheless snatched time from his preparations to send instructions about the rhododendrons, laurels, and crab apples, the “clever kind[s] of trees (especially flowering ones),” to be planted on either side of his house (14). This moment reveals the heart of Andrea Wulf’s Founding Gardeners, which shows us the remarkable extent to which founders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison engaged the world of gardening. They designed gardens, wrote about them, and toured them; they retired to them both as rest and as political maneuver; they swapped specimens and foreign seeds, experimented with new manures, and designed new gardening implements. “It’s impossible,” Wulf contends, “to understand the making of America without looking at the founding fathers as farmers and gardeners” (4). Building gardens and thinking about them, political figures both made arguments about American identity and attempted concretely to shape the American future. Wulf’s chapters follow a series of episodes beginning with the Revolution and ending with Jefferson’s and Adams’s deaths in 1826. In each episode, gardens, forests, fields, and parks play multiple roles.

Throughout the book, Wulf explores gardens’ symbolic power. In these controlled spaces, founders built microcosms of their imagined American landscape. Where Washington’s unique assembly of native trees at Mount Vernon invoked national unity, Adams’s French-inspired ferme ornée, or “ornamented farm,” asserted the continued centrality of agrarian virtue; and Madison’s model slave quarters served as the stage upon which he could display paternalistic benevolence (a benevolence, Wulf points out, not evidenced in the living conditions of the majority of his slaves). If texts shaped gardens, so too did gardens shape texts. References to grafting, growth, and seeds infused the rhetoric of the early republic, placed there by authors who were also often planters or wealthy farmers for whom these concepts had concrete meaning. Wulf’s descriptions of founding gardens can help us see yet another realm in which the new nation was being imagined and debated and can show us the “liberty tree” from new angles.

In making these gestures, Wulf demonstrates how the founders spoke a transatlantic language laid out by British writers and gardeners. This becomes particularly clear in a chapter on Adams’s and Jefferson’s 1786 tour of English gardens—part wounded retreat from London diplomacy, part pilgrimage to landscapes of meaning created by British Whigs of a previous generation. On this trip, Jefferson and Adams visited places like Stowe, built according to the prescriptions of essayist Joseph Addison. Stowe’s designers intended its freely curving pathways and naturalistic plantings as a Whiggish rebuke to the gardens of Versailles, whose rigid designs attested to monarchical authority. Stowe’s extensive array of moralizing statuary, moreover, allowed visitors literally to choose between the path of vice, adorned with adulteresses, and the path of virtue, decorated with philosophers (Adams and Jefferson took the latter option at Adams’s insistence). The founders built their gardens in conversation with and sometimes in opposition to such British spaces.

Though attention to symbolism is Wulf’s main focus, she also makes clear the extent to which their interest in gardening informed the founders’ concerns for the national economy. At a time when the wealth of the new nation derived from farming, importing exotic plants (a category which should include such homely crops as Mediterranean wheat and rice) and establishing the systems of practice needed to make plants valuable were vitally important. Within this context, Washington’s trials of plaister and Jefferson’s smuggling of rice seeds or even his “mammoth cucumbers” became practical steps towards a particular agrarian future.

In Founding Gardeners, Wulf reinterprets iconic figures and iconic events. Her work will, I hope, bring the neglected realm of garden history to a new group of readers. At times, however, the prominence of the figures she studies allows them to overshadow the larger networks within which they acted. While Wulf valuably illuminates the connections between American revolutionaries and British Whigs, it would have been wonderful to see these connections further extended to the globe-spanning botanical networks then being set up by the European empires, which have been beautifully examined by historians of science like Lisbet Koerner, James Enderby, and Emma Spary. As Washington fretted about his tobacco plants, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention eagerly swapped pecan nuts for planting, and Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis to assemble a herbarium of native species, the British were using their botanical gardens to realign world trade around other organisms: the opium poppy, tea leaves, and new varieties of sugar cane. The founders’ gardens were moves made in this larger game.

More attention to the international context would also have been helpful in the chapter titled “Balance of Nature,” examining Madison’s famous 1818 address to the Albemarle Agricultural Society. To Wulf, this address was groundbreaking, a “complex and innovative” statement of a new environmental sensibility, though a sensibility with important antecedents (206). Though Wulf is justified in stressing that attention to care of the land did not begin with George Perkins Marsh, she overemphasizes the address’s novelty, and in doing so, necessarily deemphasizes the genre of publication from which it emerged. For example, Wulf cites the wide distribution of the address as a sign of its impact; we might see the same phenomenon as a sign of the robust transatlantic network of periodicals and newspapers, agricultural societies, and corresponding gentlemen already set up to draw such addresses into a broad and productive conversation.

As she examines brightly limned figures in the foreground, Wulf also struggles to deal with the people the founders themselves held purposely in the background, the slaves who planted the trees of Mount Vernon and who painstakingly scythed the lawns of Monticello and Montpelier. In an effort to acknowledge their role, Wulf dots much of her text with brief references to their labor, though often in the footnotes. Enslaved people come into real focus only in their public role in Madison’s staged slave cottages at Montpelier. Wulf herself is aware of the extent to which the labor of slaves was purposefully obscured by slaveholders themselves—at Mount Vernon, she explains, Washington used plantings to carefully delineate the spaces occupied by slaves, and forbade them to enter the bowling green or the shrubberies. It would have been nice to see Wulf disrupt the beauty of the landscape she describes with more explicit references to its exploitative underpinnings, perhaps by threading episodes of a counternarrative through the relevant chapters. This would have allowed her to acknowledge not only the physical labor of enslaved people, but also the skill and forms of natural knowledge they deployed to turn instructions and plans into living landscapes.

These criticisms notwithstanding, Founding Gardeners is a well-researched, intriguing, and beautifully written book. The questions that it leaves unanswered will hopefully open new pathways for other historians to follow.

Justine Murison’s elegant study of nervous physiology in nineteenth-century American literature and culture enlarges our understanding of the psychological assumptions that underpin both classic and neglected nineteenth-century American fiction. Uniting authors who are rarely examined in conjunction, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Murison offers a new anatomy of American literature, one that invites readers to experience the shivers and tingles of an embodied mind open and receptive to the world, with all its delights and oddities. Murison is at her best in the chapters with race at their center: the analyses of Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee, Poe’s satires, and Stowe’s Dred. Her insights are fresh—often startlingly so—and her trenchant arguments make these less-familiar texts accessible without taming their weirdness. The first two of these chapters reintroduce fertile concepts—hypochondria and the reflex arc—that were influential in the nineteenth century but have since dropped out of the study of medicine and literature, while the latter chapter reconsiders religious enthusiasm as a nervous pathology. The two chapters on mesmerism and spiritualism cover more well-trod territory and, while cogent, are less exhilarating than Murison’s path-breaking work on Bird, Poe, and Stowe. Murison’s efficient epilogue harnesses the power of her examination of nineteenth-century “somatic nervousness” to sketch a new methodological openness or “susceptibility,” which Murison contrasts with symptomatic reading or the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Murison’s call for a more embodied reading practice, one that does not hold the text at arm’s length but rather “affirm[s] the way culture ‘hits home’ in the very fibers of the self” (178), echoes and complements the recent critical turn to affect, as well as the resurgence of interest in aestheticism, placing Murison’s work at the forefront of an exciting new movement in nineteenth-century studies.

The Politics of Anxiety moves chronologically from the 1830s to the 1880s, but focuses primarily on the antebellum period, devoting only the final chapter and the epilogue to postbellum authors. Each chapter examines a facet of nervous physiology in medical, political, philosophical, literary and other discourses. Murison’s historical research is impressive; in most chapters she binds the literary tightly to her archive with careful formal readings of fictional and nonfictional texts. The resulting arguments are sophisticated and layered, as Murison explicates the way nervous physiology operates within a novel and contextualizes that local meaning within nineteenth-century debates about the body politic. The nervous system, in the nineteenth-century imaginary, was the point of contact between the mind and the world, and this understanding of the nervous self produced an image of a highly “susceptible subject,” vulnerable to environmental stimuli (2). Murison calls this embodied subjectivity the “nineteenth-century ‘open’ body,” as opposed to a Freudian “deep” self. Since the open body functions as a hinge between inner experience and social experience, nineteenth-century psychological insights had political ramifications, and Murison deftly traces these repercussions in struggles such as the abolitionist movement and the Young America debates.

In the first chapter, perhaps Murison’s most ingenious, she restores to hypochondria its full nineteenth-century pathology, when symptoms would have encompassed both psychosomatic illnesses as well as the belief that one was transforming into inanimate and nonhuman forms such as coffeepots or dogs. As a disease associated with white males, and particularly with the debility of indolent white slave owners, hypochondria would have evoked race and slavery for nineteenth-century Americans. In Bird’s novel, Sheppard Lee, Murison traces how a white, slave-owning hypochondriac who believes he is turning into a series of objects and animals inverts the vexed status of African American chattel slaves—persons who are converted legally into things. Abolitionist rhetoric, which sought to transform “things” back into persons, mimics the cure for hypochondria, yet abolitionists also encouraged sympathy in white readers, asking them to dissolve their personal boundaries in connecting with others. Bird exploits the confusion among physiological and intersubjective sympathy, hypochondria and abolition, to expose the limits of sympathy and the precarious nature of the “open” body.

The second chapter reads Poe’s 1840s political satires of Young America through the recent discovery of the reflex arc. The reflexes, British physiologist Marshall Hall determined, operate independently of consciousness, and can be stimulated by electrical impulses even after death. This frightening specter of sensation that exceeds cognition provided a powerful metaphor for Poe’s fears of mobocracy. Poe’s Hop-Frogs and mummies warned readers that reflexive responses undermine the democratic ideal of self-government. In the third chapter, Murison reads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and two of George Lippard’s novels as explorations of the overlap between mesmerism and utopianism. Both authors demonstrate that utopian projects are incompatible with the open mesmeric body, but whereas Hawthorne rejects mesmerism’s cold empiricism in favor of the nimbus of romance, Lippard awkwardly forces his novels into a conventional marriage plot that domesticates the mesmeric subject.

Turning to Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Dred, in the fourth chapter, Murison notes that the “affect of choice for discussing antebellum religion and politics has been, of course, sentimentality,” which emphasizes the “domestic and private” nature of religion (108). Religious enthusiasm, by contrast, is a nervous state that, because it is public, has potential political effects. While doctors understood religious enthusiasm as pathological, Stowe recuperates it by highlighting its ability to spark conversions of heart and mind in people whose faculties have been deadened by the constant stimulation of modern life. These conversions allow groups to coalesce and effect political and social change. In the final chapter Murison argues that postbellum neurologists attempted to shore up their professional status and distance themselves from spiritualists by advocating a deductive method. While we now associate spiritualism with hoax, its practitioners understood the movement as a scientific demonstration of Christianity through empirical evidence. In contrast, neurologists including S. Weir Mitchell and George Miller Beard insisted on controlled experiments superintended by a scientific expert rather than a mere amassing of unverified reports. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Gates Ajar trilogy refutes neurology’s presumption of sterile expertise, Murison asserts, by re-enshrining the spiritual aspects of nervous physiology as well as the sensual aspects of the supernatural.

Despite the title (“Nineteenth-Century American Literature“), Murison excludes poetry from her study, but her conclusions illuminate Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and other poets. Dickinson’s work, in particular, seems ripe for a reading informed by the frameworks of hypochondria and the reflex arc. What are “The sun kept setting—setting—still” or “I heard a fly buzz—when I died,” after all, if not a catalog of the gradual cessation of involuntary bodily reflexes as one approaches death. More generally, Murison’s thoughtful suggestions about methodology—what we might call a hermeneutics of susceptibility—are valuable for nineteenth-century studies. By taking these nineteenth-century conceptions of nervous physiology seriously, rather than mocking or dismissing them as pre-Freudian pseudosciences, Murison practices this methodological openness, and her first-rate work testifies to the worth of this innovative methodology.

Anne was oppressed and it is difficult for me to write her. I don’t want to oppress her further and when I write her I feel sometimes her pressing back on me and this awareness of pressure is important if I want to write Anne because finding her Spirit or Soule among the words that she inhabits. She inhabits the words that are her speaking.

 

I desire to speake one word befor you proceed:

What law have I broken?

What breach of law is that

to speak what they would have me to speak

 

I speak not of

expressinge any Unsatisfaction

 

I must keep my conscience.

 

I desire to hear God speak

I desire to speak to our teacher.

 

Now if you do condemn me for speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth

speake playnelye whether you thinke

I must either speak false or true in my answer.

 

I desire you to speake

to that place

the meanness of the place

I came first to fall into

my Imprisonment

 

I fear I shall not remember it whan you have done.

 

If one shall come unto me in private, and desire me seriously

comes to me in a way of friendship privately

come in the flesh

open it unto me

 

I will willingly submit

what rule have I to put them away?

the elder women should instruct the younger

in a way of friendship

 

I then entertain the saints

I entertain them that fear

I entertain them, as they have dishonoured their parents I do

 

Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women?

If one shall come unto me

 

a friend came unto me

I had set my hand

I had not my hand

held them unlawful

held before as you

 

In what faction have I joined with them?

 

did I entertain them against any act

What breach of law is that Sir?

 

I hear no things laid to my charge

I did not come hither to answer to questions of that sort.

 

If I sound repetitive I’m repeating Anne. Anne repeating words repeated in text before as “proceedings” or transcripts in copied forms and reprinted in books and taken and retaken down, especially in the case of the trial “before the Church in Boston” because the text that is still here as a Body is a copy made by Ezra Stiles. This was then copied and put in books but those people who copied were not good spellers. Copies are a spell bound in text.

 

So I’m again copying here and maybe I’m a better speller but if you copy someone’s mistakes doesn’t that mean you made a mistake? I don’t want to make a mistake. I don’t want an Argumentum ad nauseum because that is an argument based on the fallacy that just because something is repeated makes it right. I don’t want Anne to just repeat. I want Anne to reappear.

 

conscience, Sir.

 

An oath Sir	Sir, but
when they preach		Sir prove it
breach of law is that law is that Sir?
		No Sir, Prove this then Sir
	You know Sir
		Name one Sir.
what he doth declare though he doth not know himself
in regard of myself I could,		pray Sir
That’s matter of conscience,
		No Sir I do not believe that
	Ey Sir	Ey Sir
Yes Sir.

 

I do fear the

matter of conscience,

as they do

 

If it please you by authority to put it down I will freely let you for I am subject to your authority.

 

What I can’t name often lives at the back of my mouth in Spirit and it’s distracting to me because I can’t deal with not saying what I want to say. When I can’t say it makes me stop.

 

Writing is different I have a dictionary and a thesaurus and I can get lost in meaning and connections between words but saying is different. If I stop there is a time expectation and this makes me anxious so even more I can’t speak and the words’ Body is lost and Spirit is lost and Soule is lost and the words get swallowed up. So if there’s a passage of time where someone is quiet for a hundred years is a lot of words getting swallowed up and lost and how many survive. If there’s almost four hundred years words swallowed. Not tinny satellite delay. Not musty book delay. Not can’t say not wasn’t said not thought better about. Words taken away. Like the Bodies and Soules, the Bodies lying in the Grave rising agayne gives me the creeps resurrection words. Saying words that have a history carries that history carries the anxious expectation out of the Grave where it was lost. Now the word reaches and touches my ears unwarmly brutish. I am not familiar. I sit down and word by word come together.

 

Redemption is not Resurrection. Reread is not Rewrite is not Respeak. Speaking is never vayne conversation because it is Speaking and not Respeaking even if its Body dies not the Soule or the Spirit. Certain things go on living whether or not they’re written and whether they’re spoken they stay with you. Their Body dies but tell me their Soule dies.

 

the Body that dyes shall rise agayne

but what Body shall rise

 

prove that both soule and body are saved?

 

I am redeemed

inquire for Light

in private.

in the sight of God

 

Though I never doubted that

the Soule was Imortall yet …

 

did not come to

inquire for Light

 

see fadeth away like a Beast.

in the sight of God

 

And I see more Light a greate deal by

God indeed,

it is cleare to me or God by him hath given me Light.

I doe thanke God that I better see

for I never kept my Judgment from him.

 

I think the soule to be nothing but Light.

Yes I doe, takinge Soule

for Light

returned to God indeed, but the Soule dyes

 

The Spirit is immortall indeed

but prove that the Soule is.

 

the Soule dyes

the spirit that God gives returnes

returnes to God that gave it.

Castinge the soule into Hell

 

there was none with me but myself

I took Soule for Life.

 

I thank the Lord I have Light

 

It’s important to speak about God when you’re speaking about Anne. The magistrates deciding Anne’s sentence thought Anne said God spoke to her, but they did not believe God spoke to her. I don’t mean they didn’t believe in God because they did. Maybe they were frightened of believing God spoke to Anne. Frightened of believing God was that sort of God that could speak to Anne. Anne is speaking to me and I’m trying to write Anne but it is difficult.

 

answer me this

to prevent such aspersions

 

Being much troubled to see the falseness

I came afterwards to the window

wherein he shewed me the sitting of the judgment and the standing of all high and low

he showes that he dyes

he hath let me see which was the clear

 

But now having seen him which is invisible

I do not remember that I looked upon

writings you should see

 

though there be a sufficient number of witnesses

Shew me whear thear is any

answer before you

 

let me see

 

It is more than I know.

I desire you to answer

 

proves it that speakes soe.

 

If there was witchcraft involved recall those and the witchcraft inside Soules. It must be that sort of witchcraft if we can say one atom acts and another atom miles miles away they act that is empathy which is witchcraft. These are Soules how they have a connection to being so it is a connection to everything which you cannot waste.

 

Do not be afraid of when they tell you it is witchcraft I would tell you, Anne. Witchcraft is the Soule in aggression in assertion also it is in passion. The Soule messy risks obedience and if you wait the interpretation drags you under in its husbandry. Cleanly speech falls under the heading of prophesy and is not subject to control. If you choose in your speech this arrangement reaches more easily and acts and connects to speech more these parts of speech you hardly control like predicate and deixis. Anne is here. I hear her.

 

So to me by an immediate revelation.

 

the voice of Moses

said

bring proof of these things

 

the voice of John Baptist

said

I find things not to be as hath been alledged

 

the voice of antichrist

said

but that is to be proved first.

 

Do you think it not lawful

and why

this is a free will offering

 

if you do condemn me for speaking

for I am subject to your authority.

 

for all those voices are spoken of in scripture

those voices are

of my own heart

 

those voices are

 

Obliterated }

 

what hath bine spokin

it shall rise,

 

but what Body shall rise,

if he be not united to our fleshly Bodies, than those Bodies cannot rise.

 

held them

fleshly Bodies

have I joined with them?

 

whan I sayd I had pleaded for them as much as others

I ment only in seekinge Comfort from them.

Statement of poetic research

I will admit first of all that the word “statement” makes me uneasy. It is more comfortable for me to ask questions and give examples than to make a statement. In the work presented here, which uses as its source-text the transcriptions of the court and church trials of Anne Hutchinson, questions are the starting point for my text. Questions are the nature of research.

But I believe a lot was asked of her. I was first provided the transcripts of the trials in a graduate course on the history of secularization that used questions around this text and its context as a starting point. Anne Hutchinson was considered a heretic by those who were questioning her in the trials, by both the city and church officials—though that is a difficult distinction to make of the highly orthodox early Bostonians. It is interesting to me that, as an unorthodox woman in the midst of a generation seen as an important seed of American democracy, she causes so much trouble—both for the orthodox establishment of the Bay colony and for our own founding myths. Anne Hutchinson was a religious dissident and was punished for it. What I couldn’t help gathering from the transcripts was that, while she was answering the questions of the magistrates, frequently being coy, her own questions were never answered. This is what spurred me to re-take her words, to find the questions I hear her asking and bring them back into conversation.

This work is a combination of my text and Anne Hutchinson’s. My own writing is part empathetic response to the difficulties I heard in her voice, as her beliefs and womanhood were dissected, and part meditation on her own, and the transcripts’, place in America’s history. Each verse line of Hutchinson’s text in the work is a line reproduced from the transcription; my intention is to preserve her diction and her concerns. There are questions even here, however. Is a transcription an authored work? If the words are being spoken, is the voice then the author or is it the person who attempts to set the voice on paper—is Anne Hutchinson the author of these transcripts? Is authoring a form of creating or one of capturing? Conversely, is re-contextualizing also a re-authorizing? Giving in to various kinds of authority over the text allows it to be opened in different ways. Certain frames are required for the presentation of a text. My own authority here, my taking, hampers how you read Anne Hutchinson’s words. Yet, in the case of my authority as a reader, she calls out to me to want her voice to be captured, at the very least in how her words and faith can speak out from the page. In this sense, we can be subject to her authority if we allow ourselves to listen.

If a person can be said, at all, to be alive today when they have passed away long ago, it would seem to be in her voice, speaking in her words that were once “taken down,” written. Just as the soul is often said to reside someplace in the body that is non-physical and non-anatomical, though usually somewhere in the chest, so too the voice arises seemingly miraculously from the same chest, perhaps even from the same source. The written word, in turn, emulates this voice, allowing it to live timelessly, albeit in a bound format. Thus, I am interested in unbinding Anne Hutchinson’s voice from the trials, from the magistrates’ questions, from transcription.

As I have grown more familiar with Anne Hutchinson, the historical person, and her life before and after the trials, the more she speaks to me as “Anne” through the words she has chosen, the words that have been taken. I cannot be sure if she has revealed her voice to me the way she felt revealed to by her God, but I do feel a scary closeness to her, a spooky action-at-a-distance, like her words are somehow also mine but separated, by time. When I read the transcripts, in my voice, when I read her words, they came out from my body. Something was being transmitted, so I felt I must take it down.