In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 47-53



[Access article in PDF]

Making Memories in Early America

Susan M. Stabile. Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xiii + 284 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $34.95.

In the opening of her book Memory's Daughters, Susan M. Stabile recounts how, in 1830, Deborah Norris Logan wistfully remembered her family's house that had stood for nearly seventy years on a street corner in Philadelphia only to be razed and replaced by the Second Bank of the United States. Logan lamented that when the house was destroyed, she lost some of her memories of the house and of her life in it too. She needed the physical structure of the house, its architectural style, the recesses of place and memory hidden in the rooms and spaces she knew so well. This material culture sparked Logan's most intimate and loving memories of the life she lived in the house and among the goods that filled it. More than that, those goods sparked her life remembered, giving meaning to her life as she looked back at it across the plot of land on which her family's house had once stood.

In many respects, Logan was practicing the kind of memory recovery that has come under increasing study by scholars studying the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 But Stabile takes that literature in a new direction by carefully examining how a coterie of women in the Delaware Valley constructed their personal memories through their mnemonic associations with material culture. These women aspired not to build the consensus that often defined a national, or public, memory but rather they aimed "at accurately recreating" a specific, more personal, kind of historical record (p. 4). To that end, they compiled and preserved their anomalous histories in genealogical commonplace books both to teach their daughters the family history and to secure the family memory. To assemble appropriate commonplace books, to put together those events and material culture that shaped a life lived so they could preserve a life remembered, the coterie focused on the local, the specific, and the domestic. The writers, however, knew that the process of compiling and of writing their commonplace books would always be incomplete. They hoped that their histories would be constantly added to, edited, changed, and indexed for future generations. Their histories, and how [End Page 47] they put them together, demonstrate how personal memory was "associative, recursive, and utterly incomplete" (p. 14). In short, memory was, and is, a lived practice.

To describe memory as a continuous, exploratory journey, Stabile adopts a somewhat unconventional narrative approach. Rather than adhere to traditional chronology or to a more standard narrative, Stabile follows the writings of several Delaware Valley women writers—Deborah Logan, Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, Elizabeth Fergusson, and Annis Stockton—through the processes of memory building. Such an approach heightens the immediacy readers feel for these women writers and illustrates how they tried to create and recreate memories and preserve the people, places, and things they adored in rhetorical immortality.

Stabile divides Memory's Daughters into two sections. In the first, she analyzes the material goods and culture that helped her subjects evoke and preserve their memories. Although Deborah Logan stands out, Stabile recaptures all of their houses as intimate, female, material forms the writers used to position the female mind as a milieu of knowledge and memory. For all of the women, Stabile argues, architecture depended on and reinforced memory—a phrase that, like almost every turn of phrase and analysis, provides insight while reflecting a second, more nuanced meaning back at the viewer and reader. In this sense, architecture served as a mnemonic device. Columns, doorways, and symmetrical designs all inspired remembering, as does, and did, interior construction including balustrades, libraries, dining tables, and favorite chairs. Stabile, however, flips this meaning. If the house spurred the mind to remember, and the goods in the house helped store those memories in desks or drawers, the mind also acted as...

pdf

Share