Of Documents and Texts

In the late spring of 2007, I attended a Jay-fest: a celebration of the life and career of my Ph.D. advisor Jay Fliegelman, an early Americanist famous for his unique blend of historical and literary scholarship. At this event, American cultural history was celebrated; but historians, the kind who work in history departments, did not fare as well. I'm sure we all have experienced something similar. Compared to nineteenth-century American studies, early American literary and cultural studies remains in intense dialogue and competition with its history-department-based counterpart. And carping comments from both sides of the aisle aside, early American feminist scholarship in particular benefits immensely from its close, if fraught, ties to historical studies. I'd like us to think about how we got in this mess, and the promise it holds.

I'll begin with an example: what is your first emotion on hearing the words "republican motherhood"? The fate of this catchphrase is a good example of how history and English departments can feed each other's complacency. While "R.M.," as it is often referred to, put early American women's studies on the map, it now elicits the inward groans that accompany anything overfamiliar. By this point, we've had ample time to realize the many individuals it fails to account for: women of color, the poor, or for that matter those early national women who were neither republican nor mothers. But our exhaustion with this concept has less to do with its initial articulation in Linda Kerber's now-famous book (and her other works), as well as in works by Mary Beth Norton and Jan Lewis, than with its indiscriminate application. And for this, we are at least partly responsible. Every time we begin an undergraduate class by invoking republican mothers, we rely upon them to do work for us that we'd rather not do ourselves. We import a phrase and force it to stand in for a complex body of historical research. Historians, meanwhile, often reduce multifaceted poems, novels, and performances to monovocal take-home messages, in order to derive stable rubrics for the generalization of discrete experience. In Fliegelman's recent summation: historians reduce texts to documents. We resent this practice, while continuing to rely upon it to set the stage for our own celebrations of ambivalence, overdetermination, and textual nuance.

To what do we owe our love-hate relationship with early American history? My untested theory is that it has everything to do with our nation's love of origin myths, and its correspondingly generous funding of early American historical scholarship relative to literary scholarship. (This disproportion is felt in relative numbers of early Americanist professors working in each department, as well as in grants, conferences, presses, journals, and most of all, popular literary culture, where the founding-father biography reigns supreme. For an overview of the problem, see the essays in Slauter et al.) After all, origins are by definition the ground upon which we stand. And to attain an illusion of stability, documents are needed, not texts. In such a climate, it can be dangerous to grant indeterminacy too much sway. And yet for feminist early Americanists in particular, not only must the relevant data be excavated from beneath, deep within or outside the official public record, but more often than not the stories we tell work against any positivist understanding of the period. Revolutions betray, and in betrayals we find hidden opportunity. Hence we proceed against the grain, and are not always the more appreciated for it.

How can early Americanist English and interdisciplinary professors benefit from and improve our current circumstances? To the extent that we can put aside interdepartmental politics, the generous resources allotted to history-based early American studies may work to our advantage. There is nothing to say that text-based scholars can't share in the relative wealth of historical institutions, including presses and scholarly journals willing to publish our work; historical archives and the grants to get us to them; and conferences sponsored by groups such as the Society for Historians of the Early American...